Free Therapy: RawTherapee as of Version 3.0 Under GPLv3

01/07/2010

RawTherapee is undisputedly the number one Linux program for reworking digital images into RAW format. With the license change the program becomes free software.

Gábor Horváth has released a new alpha version of his RawTherapee digital photo editing program for download. The alpha1 will be available for the first time as source code, which Gábor made concurrent with a licensing change:

"I decided to change the license to GPL and thus offer the source code to the open source community. This does not mean that I stop developing RawTherapee. I will invest as much time into the development as till now."

As he clarifies in his announcement, three factors motivated his choice. First, he wanted to devote more time to image processing algorithms rather than GUI programming. Secondly, he was frustrated by the amount of bug reports he couldn't reproduce. Most importantly, his daughter, at age 10 months, needed more attention.

For all three cases, the previous solo developer on RawTherapee wanted to open the code for more programming participation with the effect of improving the software and leaving him free for other important pursuits.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<section xmlns:image="http://ez.no/namespaces/ezpublish3/image/" xmlns:xhtml="http://ez.no/namespaces/ezpublish3/xhtml/" xmlns:custom="http://ez.no/namespaces/ezpublish3/custom/"><paragraph xmlns:tmp="http://ez.no/namespaces/ezpublish3/temporary/">Newly available as source code, the digital photo editing tool RawTherapee.</paragraph></section>

The source code for the current alpha1 version of RawTherapee 3.0, which works over a multi-tab interface and has a completely new editor and batch processor, is in the SVN repository on Google. The author requests patches to be sent to patches at rawtherapee dot com.

Details on the new version and further development of RawTherapee are on the project homepage.

( Marcel Hilzinger)

Related content

  • First Developer Version of GNOME Activity Journal

    Following over a year's worth of work the GNOME Activity Journal now appears in its first developer version, 0.3.2. The Zeitgeist framework it uses assumes the same version number.

  • Project Harmony Launches Today

    "Project Harmony is like Creative Commons for contributor agreements. We've set out to capture the best practices of free and open source software contributions, across a diverse array of project cultures, communities, and values." said Allison Randal, a community participant in Project Harmony. "The public review process for the Alpha versions of the documents launches today, and runs through May 6th. After a year of hard work by the original ~100 drafting volunteers, we're really looking forward to broader participation in this public review."

  • Video effects and compositing with Natron

    Elaborate video compositing, blue screen tricks, and other complex video effects normally only appear in high-priced programs like Adobe After Effects, Nuke, or Fusion. Natron is open source, free, and gives high-priced alternatives a run for their money.

  • The Unknown Horizons strategy game

    Colonizing new territory, processing raw materials, and trading goods are ingredients for popular strategy games. This genre is served on Linux by the free Unknown Horizons project.

  • Controlling a computer with speech

    The Blather, FreeSpeech, Palaver, Simon, and Vedics speech recognition programs are ready to respond to voice commands. This sounds good in theory, but there are some pitfalls in practice.