libjpeg-turbo 3.0 has been released, and why there may never be a 3.1

I guess I&#x27;ll be contrarian.<p>Being a commercial product is hard. Having customers, supporting them, etc is very hard. Most can&#x27;t sustain themselves either. Especially when competing with open source.<p>Every time I read about &quot;criminal underfunding&quot; of open source, it comes off as people wanting to be able to capture some of the value of being commercial without <i>any</i> of the cost. Being open source means more people use your software. But they owe you nothing at all for that. Enough value to pay themselves to work on it is not a small amount of value, and most commercial software doesn&#x27;t make it there either.<p>If you want people to pay then be paid software. Otherwise you often just want a contract with terms nobody wants to pay you for. There is nothing abnormal about that, and it&#x27;s certainly not &quot;criminal underfunding&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m sorry it&#x27;s not as easy as people want it to be, but it never was - this isn&#x27;t new, and it not likely to be anytime soon.<p>The main difference now seems to be how many more people feel their users should have greater responsibility than they require of them. That&#x27;s one of the things that often makes your product popular though.

Open source developers are not being paid. They published under licenses that allow zero cost and businesses won&#x27;t pay.<p>If you want to write open source code for living, you have to find a business model that works. In this case, it is even under permissive license.<p>* code freeze - code is under open source license only a certain time after commit&#x2F;release. Maybe add &quot;support&quot;, aka you get security fixes in timely manner.<p>* open core - put some features behind commericial door.<p>* go ImageSharp way of split license. That one is fun, because MS deprecated&#x2F;killed (throws exceptions on attempt to use) official image&#x2F;font library and that was was intended replacement. Rather blatant offloading of costs.<p>This has been rehashed several time (core-js recently <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;zloirock&#x2F;core-js&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;docs&#x2F;2023-02-14-so-whats-next.md">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;zloirock&#x2F;core-js&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;docs&#x2F;2023-02...</a>).<p>The gist of it is: Companies are not going to pay if they don&#x27;t have to. That is the reality and it&#x27;s not going to change. Plan accordingly.

I&#x27;m torn on this. On one hand I do agree and lament that many foundational open source products are underfunded to the detriment of its users.<p>But like I say when a for-profit corporation complains and blames outside forces when they have trouble with their finances: it is not our responsibility to make your business model work.<p>If you want to get paid a certain amount to write software, donations are often not a reliable way to do that. As much as I am an open-source advocate, dual licensing and requiring payments for commercial use seems like a better path to stable income, assuming others believe your software is worth the price.

There are probably a ton of projects that depend on libjpeg-turbo, but the first thing that comes to mind are browser vendors. It&#x27;s probably fair to say that most jpegs are viewed in web browsers. They should really just chip in, or even formally employ the author to just continue working on this library.

Solution: ask your company to sponsor the project. It’s easy:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sponsors&#x2F;libjpeg-turbo">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sponsors&#x2F;libjpeg-turbo</a><p>Ideally, every developer in every large co would be given some budget to spread sponsorship money around as they saw fit—ask your manager to make it happen. Note that they may be able to register this as a marketing expense, which may be more favorable to your accounting department.<p>(I use this library in PhotoStructure via Sharp and libvips, so I just started sponsoring it)

The solution is probably to do what academics do. Write grant proposals.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nlnet.nl&#x2F;news&#x2F;2023&#x2F;20230401-call.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nlnet.nl&#x2F;news&#x2F;2023&#x2F;20230401-call.html</a><p>If you want to write OSS for a living get good at writing grant proposals. There&#x27;s money out there, but you have to know where it is and you have to ask for it.

Sad to see this—libjpeg-turbo is great! I once built it into an iOS project to allow reading &amp; writing of giant JPEGs when the first party API used too much RAM.

This is part of something we pay 300k per year for, should they sponsor the projects they include in their product?

This is the sort of thing Google could just chuck a chunk of money at, it would be less than a rounding error to them.

The author chose a license. Why not dual license it for commercial use?

Software development is the process of pure creation. It shouldn&#x27;t be debased with the language of resource scarcity. A weekend spent hacking on simd assembly optimizations is not a loss of labor resources. Why write code if not for the pleasure of it? No open source developer should ever apologize to his fans for delaying a release because some Apparatchik at Microsoft refused to sign his binary. Open source is not the service industry for schemers and penny-pinching money men. If you&#x27;re too nice to those people then you&#x27;ll just end up as cynical and burnt out as them. DRC should consider backpacking or possibly couchsurfing, then come back to libjpeg-turbo after a year with a clear mind.

For a library like libjpeg-turbo, it&#x27;s probably best that it stays in maintenance mode.<p>I mean... it&#x27;s JPG. It&#x27;s the traditional lossy image format that everyone&#x27;s been using since forever, and that hasn&#x27;t received any changes. It also shouldn&#x27;t receive any changes, as its big advantage is its compatibility. If you want something better, you&#x27;d use other formats like avif.<p>I&#x27;m all for paying open source maintainers, and this guy should receive money so he can continue to fix bugs and do other minor maintenance work. But I don&#x27;t see why there should be new features in the default jpg library.

This entire comment thread is missing the point.<p>By releasing this library at no charge, the author is valuing his software at zero dollars. Downstream users accept his offer.<p>There is no story here.

meanwhile a hedge-fund manager somewhere probably just paid themselves 10s of millions for having some sneaky trading&#x2F;M&amp;A&#x2F;roll-up idea and executing it.

Would it help if ISPs levied a small “tax” which would get distributed to visited&#x2F;liked sites?

I&#x27;m sorry but I have no sympathy. I turn down real jobs to work on my hobby. Why won&#x27;t anybody pay me??<p>What does he expect to happen? I really don&#x27;t get it. If you like to work on opensource. Sure, do your thing. But if the benefit in CV building and personal satisfaction are not enough, why don&#x27;t you stop doing it?

Open source is EXTREMELY HARMFUL to the non-owning&#x2F;entrepreneuring class: Big business can built their billion dollar companies on open source, while the developers lose out: Without open source, companies would have to hire more devs to implement solutions, or they would have to pay external devs money for their solutions. This would also foster competition between different solution offerings.<p>It&#x27;s very unfortunate that software engineers, especially the good ones able to create libraries used by pretty much everyone, seem to lack the drive to monetize their work and instead accept payment through GitHub stars, likes and prayers.