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So why is Picasa not Free Software?

Posted on: Thu, 2008-01-10 16:16
So why is Picasa not Free Software?

This might come as a shock to you, but Google is unfair. Shocked

Yeah, a real shock.

They're using GNU/Linux heavily. They even have an in-house version of Ubuntu, but when they release software it is proprietary. Why, exactly, is Picasa non-free for example? What do they get out of it? It is free of charge anyway. May it be the precious algorithms they use in the code? Yeah right. And so what if they feel they have trade secrets in there. It is still unfair. GNU/Linux has plenty of cool code in it and it is still successful. I would dare to say that Picasa would be even more popular if it was Free Software!

No, Google is not just unfair. They're really stupid sometimes.

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Posted on: Thu, 2008-01-10 18:03 #1
I'm not interested in using

I'm not interested in using Picasa as long as it isn't freedomware. That said, is there anything in Picasa that digiKam doesn't have? Apart from the cluttered KDE GUI, digiKam is pretty good.

Posted on: Fri, 2008-01-11 22:48 #2
A glimmer of an answer

I'm always one to come up with a "conspiracy theory" (he he) when I look at things objectively.

My answer as to why Google doesn't release Picasa (or something else) as Free Software? They can't.

I'm willing to bet you that Google makes MORE heavy use of Free Software then many people are seeing up front. For instance, perhaps ALL of Picasa is already Free Software but the licenses used within them are incompatible. How interesting (read, ironic) would it be to find that Picasa is a mix of BSD, GPL and CDDL code that can't be distributed as a binary because certain "viral" licenses can't be met at the same time.

Rather than kill a great product because you would HAVE to distributed it as source - violate the license on it's components and pass it off as non-free to make it easier to use.

Posted on: Thu, 2008-01-17 03:29 #3
Linspire's

Lphoto was good too and now available in the Debian main repository.

Also, Picasa will not work under GNU/Linux without Wine (even the official binaries for GNU/Linux still uses Wine).

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