LibreSprite – open-source pixel art editor

271 points by nicoloren 18 hours ago on hackernews | 85 comments

Begging open source projects to stop with the libre<name> convention, it's awkward to say, it's cringe and seems to spiritually doom a project to fail.

PowerElectronix | 17 hours ago

That's like asking a EU product to not be named Euro-{product}.

: whywhywhywhy | 14 hours ago
Also cringe and tainted.

Dwedit | 17 hours ago

One example that really sticks in my mind was "Libreboot". Yes, it's supposed to represent a free BIOS/booting system. But it also sounds like the name of a library dedicated to rebooting your computer.

bbkane | 13 hours ago

To me that sounds awesome

   func RebootItAll()

progx | 17 hours ago

LibreOffice ?

notachatbot123 | 17 hours ago

Yes, that is one of the major offenders. It is very awkward to pronounce in many languages.

kalterdev | 16 hours ago

I speak two languages (English and Russian) and have never found their name to be awkward. This is the first time, actually, that I've seen somebody say they don't like their name.

notachatbot123 | 14 hours ago

A good indicator is that the Wikipedia page even has pronounciation information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice

What other major software has that?

bloak | 14 hours ago

> What other major software has that?

Linux?

EDIT: Also Qt, MySQL, SQLite, GIMP (rather unnecessarily), ...

mock-possum | 11 hours ago

Somewhat disappointingly, it’s just pronounced exactly the way it’s spelled: LEE-bruh-OFF-iss

Ref: https://youtu.be/YHBve8v13VY?si=Bql2vH6C4goZN_kX

From your comment somehow I was expecting something a bit more exotic

: socalgal2 | 2 hours ago
TIL it's 'bruh'. Until today I thought it was 'bray'

desdenova | 16 hours ago

Curious on what languages have a hard time saying Libre.

Every latin-derived language (which are most of the western languages) can pronounce it naturally, and even English speakers can approximate it well enough to be understood (even though they're incapable of pronouncing the non-retroflex `r`).

zimpenfish | 12 hours ago

> even English speakers can approximate it well enough to be understood

I'd go for "LEE-broffis" which I don't think is all that hideously far away?

tech_hutch | 4 hours ago

Wait, it's not leeb-er?

: scj | an hour ago
The "bre" in "libre" is pronounced similarly to "zebra". Kinda. It'll get you in the ballpark, which is good enough for an Anglo.
"This Hour has 22 Minutes" had a great sketch where both a Francophone (Gavin Crawford impersonating Chantal Hebert) and an Anglo (I forget who) were stumbling over proper nouns from the opposite language. The joke was that both were trying too hard to pronounce things "properly". It came off as inauthentic and awkward.

madduci | 16 hours ago

At least they signal that the project is open and free. What about projects using "Open" but they aren't? (See: OpenAI)

kleiba | 16 hours ago

The "libre" terms originates from the "free software" movement which does not like the term "open source" on philosophical grounds. In English, "free" has multiple meanings, and the romance language-derived "libre" was chosen in the past to distinguish the movement's ideals from the use of "free as in beer".

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

m12k | 15 hours ago

I just wish more of these projects would be a bit more ambitious and put more focus in their communication on being good at what they do, rather than being free and made by idealists. They're branding themselves in a way that only really appeals to other techy idealists, while accidentally putting off a lot of potential users who are neither technical nor philosophical enough to know or care what a term like libre means. There's a lot of good, free software that is selling itself short by communicating more about being the latter than the former.

kleiba | 15 hours ago

I think there's some truth to what you say - at the same time, a lot of successful products have names that basically have no meaning at all, or at least none that's related to what the project actually does ("Windows", "Cursor", "Firefox", etc...)

Of course, a point could be made that any inoffensive but basically fluffy name is still better than a geeky sounding tech babble name...

lukan | 15 hours ago

The most succesful open source projects (firefox, blender, linux, krita,..) do not have libre in their name, the most famous of those who have is probably libreoffice, but it is not exactly loved.

So I totally agree on rather having a name that appeals normal users, than a certain tech bubble who will rather use the terminal wherever they can anyway ..

kleiba | 15 hours ago

Hey, no terminal shaming here!

: lukan | 9 hours ago
Apologies, not my intention ..

joemi | 6 hours ago

"Windows" actually is related to what it does. As you might already know, before Windows, you just had DOS, which was 100% full screen all the time. Then Windows came along an let you run DOS programs (and Windows programs, of course) inside of their own windows, and let you have multiple windows open at once. Then, only after that was hugely successful, it became its own standalone OS. So at least at the time it was created and became popular, its name was very related to what it did.

socalgal2 | 2 hours ago

You're not wrong but neither IMO is the person you're responding to. emacs wasn't renamed LibrEmacs. gcc wasn't renamed Librecc. "Libre" can both be trying to convey something, and an arguably a bad name that turn lots of people off.

abirch | 15 hours ago

Almost any name is better than GIMP.

: pawelmurias | 12 hours ago
It would be impossible to come up with a name that reflected the nature of the gimp program better.

krige | 17 hours ago

Haven't used LibreSprite but Aseprite, from which it forked, has been an enormous boon to me, for pixel arting it definitely fits my habits and abilities much better than anything else I tried (GIMP, Krita, GrafX2, actual DPaint, Digipaint...).

zackchen | 17 hours ago

This looks like Aseprite. Aseprite is already open source and you can get it for free, all completely legal. The only caveat is that you need to compile it yourself (which takes 2-5 shell commands). I think this is more than fair, but ripping off Aseprite is not so much. Their license also strictly prohibits that behavior.

erk__ | 17 hours ago

The history section of the repo clears it up [0]

> LibreSprite originated as a fork of Aseprite, developed by David Capello. Aseprite used to be distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2, but was moved to a proprietary license on August 26th, 2016.

> This fork was made on the last commit covered by the GPL version 2 license, and is now developed independently of Aseprite.

Also I am not really sure if you can convince me that this is a open source license: https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/blob/main/EULA.txt

Not that it is a unreasonable license, but it is not open source.

[0]: https://github.com/LibreSprite/LibreSprite?tab=readme-ov-fil...

whizzter | 16 hours ago

Same old story, too much support requests and bad actors making it hard to make money off opensource.

This is one case where we really should support the original product, you can buy a perpetual licence of a pittance and they just 2 guys chugging along.

LibreSprite has 5000 commits, 30 in the past year whilst ASEPrite has over 10000 at this point.

chrysoprace | 15 hours ago

The person you're replying to was making a clarification on the license, not arguing about the validity of changing the license or charging for it.

Libresprite is an important project because people can fork it and learn from it by extending it, and submit those patches upstream, regardless of how active it is.

: mort96 | 14 hours ago
I think aseprite is a perfectly fine project, but where possible, I like to use open source tools rather than proprietary tools.

1313ed01 | 15 hours ago

I have paid for Aseprite, but on many machines I just install the old GPL version, usually available as a package. It is fine for most tasks, even if the latest version has many improvements.

A fork of the old version to have a slightly better version conveniently available in package repos would be nice. I don't think it has to catch up with Aseprite to be useful.

Buttons840 | 9 hours ago

It's good to have open source software.

It's good to support honest and high quality proprietary software.

Aseprite offers the latter good, this offers the former good.

enlyth | 16 hours ago

Aseprite is such a joy to use that I paid for it just to support the developers

: Aeolun | 15 hours ago
It’s also really cheap!
: vunderba | 12 hours ago
Agreed, and it's also available on Steam! I really like the way they handle onion skinning as well, and there's a surprising number of useful plugins (such as tweencel) for it.

ROllerozxa | 16 hours ago

Aseprite is source available nowadays, not open source. Libresprite was then forked off of the last commit of Aseprite before the license was changed from the GPL.

paxys | 14 hours ago

1. Asperite is not open source.

2. It’s okay for two projects to do the same thing, even if you personally prefer one over the other.

lachieh | 13 hours ago

Aseprite is open source. The source is open for anyone to access right here: https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite

You might be confusing license with access. The product itself has a proprietary license. Even then, a majority of the libraries they produce are also available under the MIT license.

: pocketarc | 12 hours ago
"open source" has a specific definition[0], which this project does not meet. When people say "open source", that is the definition that they are referencing. It's the reason why there's been endless discussion about "open weights" models not being "open source".
"source available"[1] is a different thing, and you're right that this project is "source available".
[0]: https://opensource.org/osd
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software
: juliangmp | 12 hours ago
How can you say its open source and 3 sentences later that it has a proprietary license.
Their EULA forbids distributing the software, hence not open source.
: paxys | 12 hours ago
You are describing source available. That is not the same as open source.
: veggieroll | 11 hours ago
Source available is not open source. Don’t try to redefine what open source means. It’s so insulting to volunteers hard work.

DDayMace | 6 hours ago

I think Libresprite is a fork of Aseprite from before it changed its license. In that context, maybe not a big deal.

rtpg | 6 hours ago

didn't even realize Aseprite is source available!

I highly recommend paying for Aseprite, it's a very good little tool.

txrx0000 | 16 hours ago