Re: PNG roots and farewell

Hello, Willem, hello, everyone,

On 7 February 2017 at 22:51, Willem van Schaik <[email protected]> wrote:
> last night I picked out one person for that, which I apologize for ...
> because it is not a single person, the whole group has changed and
> nothing gets done anymore, for 20 years
> [...]
> Glenn, how do I unsubscribe ??  not a joke !!

Willem, I respect your choice, but that should not prevent me from saying:

Please don't leave. Or, if you already did, please come back!

> if the 24 of us in 1996 would have operated like that, I'm truthfully
> serious that PNG would never have come to life

It is very, very unfortunate that you are entirely correct!

What just happened between you and me was rather a case of a straw
that broke the camel's back. I find our community highly
dysfunctional. Opposition to technical arguments degrade into personal
attacks, and, sometimes, further into downright shaming, far too
easily.

And in the light of this, nothing gets done, indeed.

I was indeed hurt, especially because I consider you in high esteem,
and I understand you did not mean to say what you said. It's not that
everyone else here was civil :-(

And by the time you reacted, I reacted to your reaction. When, in
fact, we should not have come even close to that, in the first place.
We need to fix our community instead.

We need to do more work, too, and not rely on private implementations
introducing private chunks. They are great for what they do, but they
will never persuade, say, the digital camera industry to pick up PNG
as long as there isn't a standardized solution. They already have
TIFF. PNG has taken over the web, but it's rather a niche (and a
pretty unsuccessful one) in areas like digital photography. PNG cannot
possibly overtake digital "Raw" formats because of the largely
different pixel representation, which cannot be addressed in PNG, by
design; and it cannot (and should not) overtake JPEG, for obvious
reasons; but it can (and should) overtake TIFF.

This is why I brought up the idea of EXIF in the first place. It's not
the only thing that needs to be done. But if we cannot even do that
much, then we might as well dismantle and leave it all to private
chunks. (Just to be clear, I would *not* want that to happen.)

In closing, I would like to say clearly that I personally value your
contribution to PNG, and I dare to think I am not the only one. We
need our common strength to carry further the PNG format development.
We need to address whatever is currently lacking in PNG, not just in
the PNG format, but in the PNG community as well.

Sincerely,
Cosmin

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