On Tue, 04 Dec 2001, Leonard Rosenthol wrote: > At 12:06 PM 12/4/2001 +0100, Sven Neumann wrote: >> if you ask me, this is a bad idea and wasted time and effort, but I >> guess it's too late now to discourage you from trying to read XCF. > > Why would adding support for XCF to ImageMagick be "a bad idea > and wasted time and effort"? Because XCF is changing? Because GIMP > users would use GIMP to convert image formats? Because no one really > uses XCF as a file format?
Here is my opinion (which is probably different from Sven's and probably different from that of other gimp developers or contributors): - XCF is changing. - XCF is designed for internal use by the Gimp while one is editing an image but it is not supposed to be used for the "final" images to be distributed to other people. Other (standard) formats such as PNG or JPEG should be used if one wants to share and image with others. So no one should use XCF as a file exchange format (except among Gimp users, maybe). - This may be controversial, but ImageMagick has a BSD-style license that includes the "advertising clause". This is not compatible with the GPL and this means that any code contributed to ImageMagick and any improvements that could be done in that code cannot be re-used later in the Gimp (maybe in a plug-in, but not in the core).
-Raphael
