e-Volve Internet Services

We have just released new versions of GEGL and babl, the libraries that take all the heavy lifting for color space conversion and image processing in GIMP. Both releases are considered a pre-requisite for doing a first 2.9 (development series) GIMP release.

The babl library got floating point conversions optimized. Additionally, HSV and HSL color models were added, CIE LAB conversions were fixed.

Most exciting improvements, however, are in the new GEGL release. A total of 71 new image processing operations were added: mostly these are ports of existing GIMP filters. Some of the existing operations were improved, and some got OpenCL versions.

Another focus of this release was performance: OpenCL support is now enabled by default when detected, there’s experimental multithreading support (use GEGL_THREADS=<number of threads> environment variable) and experimental mipmap rendering (use GEGL_MIPMAP_RENDERING=true environment variable). There’s also a new default tile backend that writes to disk in a separate thread.

The Grid project contributed several major improvements: support for using URIs in image loaders and the loading of meta-operations in JSON, created with imgflo’s online graph editor.

GEGL’s website now features a gallery of available operations and an API browser.

This release of GEGL was brought to you through contributions from 92 people. Respective source code downloads are available on gimp.org: babl 0.1.2, GEGL 0.3.0.

There is still a lot of work to be done. If you are interested to contribute ports of GIMP filters to GEGL or entirely new GEGL operations, please visit our wiki and join #gegl on irc.gimp.net.

We have just released new versions of GEGL and babl, the libraries that take all the heavy lifting for color space conversion and image processing in GIMP. Both releases are considered a pre-requisite for doing a first 2.9 (development series) GIMP release.

The babl library got floating point conversions optimized. Additionally, HSV and HSL color models were added, CIE LAB conversions were fixed.

Most exciting improvements, however, are in the new GEGL release. A total of 71 new image processing operations were added: mostly these are ports of existing GIMP filters. Some of the existing operations were improved, and some got OpenCL versions.

Another focus of this release was performance: OpenCL support is now enabled by default when detected, there’s experimental multithreading support (use GEGL_THREADS= environment variable) and experimental mipmap rendering (use GEGL_MIPMAP_RENDERING=true environment variable). There’s also a new default tile backend that writes to disk in a separate thread.

The Grid project contributed several major improvements: support for using URIs in image loaders and the loading of meta-operations in JSON, created with imgflo’s online graph editor.

GEGL’s website now features a gallery of available operations and an API browser.

This release of GEGL was brought to you through contributions from 92 people.
Respective source code downloads are available on gimp.org: babl 0.1.12, GEGL 0.3.0.

There is still a lot of work to be done. If you are interested to contribute ports of GIMP filters to GEGL or entirely new GEGL operations, please visit our wiki and join #gegl on irc.gimp.net.

This is the GIMP project’s official statement on SourceForge’s actions in regard to “abandoned” projects on their service.

We are fully aware that since their launch in 1999, SourceForge had been providing a valuable service to the Free Software community and that this service may still be relevant to some Free and Open Source Software projects today.

The GIMP project did benefit from this service: SourceForge was the place to download the Windows installer for GIMP for many years and we appreciate it as an important part of GIMP history.

When it comes to distributing GIMP, our goal is to make it as easy as possible for users to install GIMP.
We do not want our users having to dodge any “offers” or to worry about possibly installing malware in the process.

With our shared history, it was painful to watch the invasion of the big green “Download” button ads appearing on the SourceForge site. Our decision to move the Windows installers away from SourceForge in 2013 was a direct result of how its service degraded in this respect.

The situation became worse recently when SourceForge started to wrap its downloader/installer around the GIMP project binaries. That SourceForge installer put other software apart from GIMP on our users’ systems. This was done without our knowledge and permission, and we would never have permitted it. It was done in spite of the following promise made by SourceForge in November 2013:

we want to reassure you that we will NEVER bundle offers with any project without the developers consent. (emphasis in original)

To us, this firmly places SourceForge among the dodgy crowd of download sites.
SourceForge are abusing the trust that we and our users had put into their service in the past.

We don’t believe that this is a fixable situation.
Even if they promise to adhere to the set of guidelines outlined below, these promises are likely to become worthless with any upcoming management change at SourceForge.

However, if SourceForge’s current management are willing to collaborate with us on these matters, then there might be a reduction in the damage and feeling of betrayal among the Free and Open Source Software communities.

An acceptable approach would be to provide a method for *any* project to cease hosting at any SourceForge site if desired, including the ability to:

• completely remove the project and URLs permanently, and not allow any other projects to take its place
• remove any hosted files from the service, and not maintain mirrors serving installers or files differing from those provided by the project or wrap those in any way
• provide permanent HTTP redirects (301) to any other location as desired by the project

This is not unreasonable to expect from a service that purports to support the free software community.