On 2007-November-08 , at 18:16 , Ted Gould wrote:
On Thu, 2007-11-08 at 10:37 +0100, jiho wrote:
I just found out about this app developed at Stanford: http://vectormagic.stanford.edu/ which offers high quality bitmap vectorization/tracing
Yes, this is very cool.
Since it is developed in a university lab I wonder how they would license it. Maybe getting them a bit exited about Inkscape would incline them toward putting their code under a license liberal enough for Inkscape to use it. I did not contact them but I think it would be a good thing if someone more officially involved in Inkscape contacted them and discussed a possible collaboration, or at least pointed them to the traces Inkscape/Potrace can produce. I would love to see a fifth column on their comparison page with Inkscape kicking Adobe and Corel's a.... ;)
If they'd be willing to license it in an open source way, we can start to look at including it. University labs are unfortunately hit-and- miss on stuff like that.
It'll be another example of why research needs to be public and publicly funded then. In France, all work done in major school and universities labs I know about is GPLed (or approaching) just because people don't have to worry about obtaining patents and getting some money from them. The flagship example of why this is a good idea would be VLC. French research model is far from being perfect of course (veeery far!), but this aspect I really like: as a public researcher, you don't have to worry about making money from your work in order to continue doing your job. Anyway, I just hope they'll be open-minded this one time!
But, from the Inkscape perspective we want the best free solution for our users. If a new player entered the scene we'd definitely be interested.
I'll write them an e-mail, but I'm not too optimistic.
I personally think that potrace is better than Corel/Adobe today in most cases.
Definitely! That's why adding a fifth column with Potrace's output would be fair and provide them with sane competition (and in the meantime, it would be good publicity for Inkscape ;))
But, the one from Standford looks even better.
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/