This proprietary and paid software for professional image editing, written by Pavel Kanzelsberger (Slovakia)
Created for editing RGB, CMYK and HDR images,allows adding and editing layers, masks and channels, with some brushes and presets, this program is available for: Windows, Mac OS X (Power PC and Intel), Linux, FreeBSD, Be OS, Zeta, QNX, eComStation, OS/2, SkyOS and MS-DOS, but not for Haiku. And I suggest that you subscribe and direct this official letter to author of Pixel Studio with request to transfer source code to Haiku community.And I suggest that you subscribe this official letter with request to transfer Pixel Studio’s source code to the Haiku community and direct it to the author of Pixel Studio.
Sign an open community letter to a developer Pixel Studio: there
Before pursuing this, maybe contacting Pavel up front would be nice (although as mentioned he probably “can’t” even release the sources any more …
After the other Pixel32 topic I was wondering which of the other BeOS bitmap editing programs had survived and it seems Becasso is in the HaikuArchives. It has a very cute pun as a name of course, and it would be nice to continue its legacy on Haiku. Maybe it is not as good as Pixel32 but I’m sure it could be improved. The above repo even has documentation and it also seems scriptable. There is a lot of code so it seems like it would be worth working on rather than starting from scratch.
I don’t think much has changed from the last Refraction discussion from a few years ago. That thread also has references to ArtPaint and Stephan also mentions that he wrote Wonderbrush because Refraction and ArtPaint and Becasso did not properly handle alpha blending. Probably trying to continue Stephan’s work on Wonderbrush 3.0 would also be fruitful. I don’t think we need more open sourcing of abandoned projects, we need people to work on the ones we already have the code for.
I intend to mess with Wonderbrush 3.0 when I get a chance but I have a long list of such things I want to mess with…
We have nice painting apps already available on haiku. That we need is more documentation for it, so people have the chance to user and understand them.
The “haiku community” is small and most of the devs are already super busy with writing the OS itself, or applications to run on it. I’m not sure we need or want yet another application to take care of.
So, your plan seems to be:
Ask someone who wrote an app by himself, and decided to sell it and not publish it, to share the sources
Ask some people who don’t necessarily have interest in this application, to take over maintenance of it
This seems like not a great plan. Unless you have a lot of money to pay the original developer and the new team who will work on the software.
Pixel32 has an advantage over all of the above software: due to its cross-platform nature, in the event of opening the source code, we will not have as hard as you wrote, because with a high degree of probability its source code would start to improve and developers from outside our project and our OS
As a developer who earns money from writing code, this seems “demand” a little insulting. I think you are ignoring a few things -
What does Pavel get out of this?
1.1. He invested a lot of time in to making a commercial product. You want him to give it away for free?
1.2. Assuming he even has the rights (see point 2), if he wants to resurrect it as a paid product? What then?
If he sold the source/rights you are talking to the wrong person.
It is not a BeOS/Zeta specific app… open sourcing open up more than just one platform. The last thing we need is a bunch of hungry rabid other OS-ers forking the source and making platform specific alterations. See also point (1.2/2)
Who will maintain it? It is written in Pascal for a start.
Add to that, Pixel32 is written in Pascal… so no one working on Haiku is going to have any specific experience with it, outside of the few people that are “lucky” enough to use Delphi or have tinkered with Free Pascal. I can’t stress enough about this. Integrating BeAPI with Pascal is hideous. You are writing a flat C API that wraps everything in the world. I think this is one of the reasons Pixel32 barely touches the BeAPI. This then means it has to do literally EVERYTHING itself. All in Pascal. If you want it to integrate in to Haiku and use the translators and such, I guess it s possible (I don’t know if Pavel did that) but, that it a lot of work if not.
What it feels like is: convince whoever owns the source to give a free source license, keep it closed and do Haiku builds is probably the best you’ll manage. Then find someone who loves Haiku and doesn’t mind throwing that all away an programming in Pascal to maintain it…
