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A comment on Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app. Parent comment

Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by krylon on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @09:27AM (#27972126)
Paint.NET is great, too. It's not open source, unfortunately (for valid if regrettable reasons), but it's free as in free beer. The memory of its GUI makes me sigh a little whenever I open GIMP.
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Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by slugs19 on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @10:54AM (#27973182)
I use photopea.com. It's a Photoshop clone but loads much faster and works great for when you don't need some of the newest / cutting edge PS features and don't work with large files.
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Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by redeuxx on Thursday July 29, 2021 @04:48PM (#28001312)
The developer did an AMA. He makes a decent living off it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9urjmg/i_made_a_free_...

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Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by OneLeggedCat on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @02:39PM (#27975910)
How have I never tried this. Nice project.
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Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by jjeaff on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @04:16PM (#27977050)
Most amazing thing to me is that it is built and maintained by a single developer.
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Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by basch on Wednesday July 28, 2021 @02:37AM (#27980882)
and that the entire program is about 2mb. Would fit on an extra high density 3.5in floppy.

https://www.photopea.com/api/accounts

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Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by Workaccount2 on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @10:49AM (#27973123)
>(for valid if regrettable reasons)

Well now you got me curious. Why is that?

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Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by genpfault on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @11:37AM (#27973704)
> Initially, Paint.net was released under a modified version of the MIT License, with the exclusion of the installer, text, and graphics. It was completely open-source, but because breaches of license, all resource files (such as interface text and icons) were released under a non-free Creative Commons license forbidding modification, and the installer was made closed-source. Version 3.36 was initially released as partial open-source, but Brewster later took down the source code, citing problems with plagiarism. In version 3.5, paint.net became proprietary software. Users are now prohibited from modifying it.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint.net#History

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Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by colejohnson66 on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @11:31AM (#27973641)
Paint.NET was open source, but a pirate would download the code, put their name over the author’s, and click build. That’s a very clear case of copyright violation, but the author decided it wasn’t worth the effort (especially if the pirate is in another country).

https://blog.getpaint.net/2007/12/04/freeware-authors-beware...

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Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by angus-prune on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @11:42AM (#27973759)
The author blogged about it in 2009 [1]

TL;DR They used a MIT licence and other people were selling broken, rebranded cashgrab copies without changing things like the installer or crash logs being sent to the author etc

[1] https://blog.getpaint.net/2009/11/06/a-new-license-for-paint...

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Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by beerandt on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @02:22PM (#27975716)
So why isn't this a problem for other open source software? Or is it? Is it only because of the high demand for a cheaper/free Photoshop alternative?
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Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by david_allison on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @04:53PM (#27977494)
It is.

It's more than frustrating to have crash logs that don't refer to your code and contain access tokens or similar data because the author of the 'rebranded' software doesn't care about user privacy.

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Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by npteljes on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @10:25AM (#27972818)
Have you tried Pinta? Filled the niche for me after switching to Linux.
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Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by pndy on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @10:30AM (#27972876)
Pinta uses an older Paint.Net code - https://github.com/PintaProject/Pinta
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Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by mananaysiempre on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @11:19AM (#27973483)
Apparently the author was unhappy with someone re-releasing the software while erasing the original credits (multiple times?): <https://stackoverflow.com/a/1693549>. Not sure why hiding the source code would help much, but oh well.
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Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by Zababa on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @10:36AM (#27972951)
Pinta crashes very frequently for me, usually after 2/3 operations.
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Re:Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open sour... by pizza234 on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @12:36PM (#27974425)
I did, and unfortunately it's usable only for extremely basic cases.

Images of a few megapixels will cause it to crash or hang on selection. Happened so many times that I am forced to use GIMP.

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