Free Therapy: RawTherapee as of Version 3.0 Under GPLv3
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.
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.
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