Unity Continues Crunching More Out Of Crunch Texture Compression

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Unity Continues Crunching More Out Of Crunch Texture Compression

Unity is one of the big public users of the open-source Crunch DXT texture compression library. While it's no longer maintained by Rich Geldreich / Binomial, Unity has continued advancing this open-source code to further improve the compression ratio and speed...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Unity-Crunching-Crunch

[tildearrow]

Typos:

encoding selector indicies without prediction, removing duplicate endpoints and selectors, using XOR deltas, and improving the Zeng reorddering algorithm has yielded measurable performance improvements.

[Niarbeht]

Typos:

I came here to mention the typos. But no. He beat me to it again.

[GunpowaderGuy]

doesnt astc makes this piece of software irrelevant ?

[log0]

doesnt astc makes this piece of software irrelevant ?

Apples to Oranges.

Crunch is analogous to compressing your s3tc or astc texture with lzma, just specialized for textures and thus faster while achieving better compression.

[tajjada]

So Rich Geldreich is going to sit in his own sad proprietary bubble trying to convince people to buy his proprietary solutions for offering some mildly better compression, while the community takes his previous open-source project and improves it to make it even better *and* open-source *and* free ... *and* ... actually used by people. I see that as a win. It is a good thing for everyone, except maybe Rich Geldreich (from his POV at least).

[Ferdinand]

So Rich Geldreich is going to sit in his own sad proprietary bubble trying to convince people to buy his proprietary solutions for offering some mildly better compression, while the community takes his previous open-source project and improves it to make it even better *and* open-source *and* free ... *and* ... actually used by people. I see that as a win. It is a good thing for everyone, except maybe Rich Geldreich (from his POV at least).

On the other hand. If game companies paid a small fee for the use of Crunch. That money could be spend on constantly improving and updating Crunch.

[Herem]

On the other hand. If game companies paid a small fee for the use of Crunch. That money could be spend on constantly improving and updating Crunch.

Our just helping to pay his rent.

[starshipeleven]

So Rich Geldreich is going to sit in his own sad proprietary bubble trying to convince people to buy his proprietary solutions for offering some mildly better compression, while the community takes his previous open-source project and improves it to make it even better *and* open-source *and* free ... *and* ... actually used by people. I see that as a win. It is a good thing for everyone, except maybe Rich Geldreich (from his POV at least).

For the creator is is NOT a good thing, but yeah, it was his own mistake, so he can only blame himself.

That's what happens when you don't do your own research or ask for assistence to experts before choosing the license of your work.

A dual GPL+commercial license setup would have allowed him to prove his point (the reason he chose an opensource license in the first place), it would still be free for FOSS users (that are a very poor source of income anyway, and are more likely to contribute back code instead), and it would still be monetizable for any commercial project that wanted to use it in proprietary code (because GPL is the worst license to try to integrate in proprietary code EVER).

Let's hope others can learn from his mistake and go dual-licensed.

[tajjada]

For the creator is is NOT a good thing, but yeah, it was his own mistake, so he can only blame himself.

That's what happens when you don't do your own research or ask for assistence to experts before choosing the license of your work.

A dual GPL+commercial license setup would have allowed him to prove his point (the reason he chose an opensource license in the first place), it would still be free for FOSS users (that are a very poor source of income anyway, and are more likely to contribute back code instead), and it would still be monetizable for any commercial project that wanted to use it in proprietary code (because GPL is the worst license to try to integrate in proprietary code EVER).

Let's hope others can learn from his mistake and go dual-licensed.

Exactly, that is what I am advocating for as well. Look at Qt. It has done fantastic things for the FOSS community and we can all develop FOSS apps for free. The community (especially the ecosystem around KDE) has also contributed lots back to Qt. At the same time, The Qt Company (formerly Digia, formerly Nokia, formerly Trolltech, ...) has a working business model around their proprietary customers.

If only Rich Geldreich had done the same thing, it would have been great for everyone. Now he is just sitting there complaining against FOSS like some cry baby, despite it being his own fault and not that of FOSS.

I used to have a pretty good opinion of him back when he was working at Valve and I read about his work. With this whole recent fiasco, I have lost a lot of respect for him. Not that whether he has a random internet dude's respect matters to him or anything, he doesn't even know who I am ... but anyway ... I wish him all the best.