
Libtiff goes offline - hk__2
https://madfileformatscience.garymcgath.com/2016/09/08/libtiff-offline/
======
japaget
The code is now being hosted at
[http://www.simplesystems.org/libtiff/](http://www.simplesystems.org/libtiff/)
with a mirror site at
[http://libtiff.maptools.org/](http://libtiff.maptools.org/) .

~~~
sspiff
Or at [http://libtiff.org/](http://libtiff.org/)

~~~
gpvos
NO. That is an old, hijacked domain. Read the story on Wikipedia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibTIFF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibTIFF)
.

~~~
sspiff
Oh, very annoying that remotesensing.org links to libtiff.org then!

~~~
gpvos
Yes. The real libtiff people are trying to resolve that with the domain owner;
he seems to be at least a little bit more cooperative than the libtiff.org
one.

------
dustinmr
Seems like we've had organizations that house ideas for the public good for
centuries now.

Why not involve libraries in the effort? They could keep a "master" copy and
github.com, gitlab.org, SF.com, or whoever else comes next can host
development versions.

~~~
ashitlerferad
[https://www.softwareheritage.org/](https://www.softwareheritage.org/)

~~~
gpvos
They only do archiving. Hosting projects that are under development is not in
their mission.
[https://www.linuxfoundation.org/](https://www.linuxfoundation.org/) looks
like a better match.

There is a need for an organization that is willing to host established but
small and unfunded projects like libtiff, libpng, zlib, etc., and give them
some minimal organizational backing in the interest of continuity (so no
github). Somewhat similar to, but more general than, what the Network Time
Foundation is doing for ntp and related projects.

------
archildress
Thankful for libtiff's role in the PSP exploit community many years ago. :)

~~~
benwilber0
also one of the original iPhone 1 jailbreaks

~~~
Benjamin_Dobell
To my knowledge this was _the_ original iPhone jailbreak (JailbreakMe). I was
on IRC whilst the author was seeking donations before releasing it ;) Ran it
on my trusty iPod Touch 1g only minutes after it was released.

This was for iOS 1.1 though, not iOS 1.0, as it was not encrypted and was
never really locked down. It was Apple's choice to release iOS 1.0 without the
security enabled that made further jailbreaking efforts much more straight-
forward, because there was extensive knowledge of the file system.

This was all well before there was an App Store, and when Apple's public
position was that they'd never allow third-party software on their platform ;)

------
saghm
A bit tangential, but I just noticed that in the Arch Linux repos, `libtiff`
is version 4.0.6, but there's another package called `libtiff4`, which is
version 3.9.7. I don't suppose anybody here might know the rationale behind
this bizarre version/naming paradigm?

~~~
chrisseaton
Isn't the number in the library file name a binary incompatibility counter and
not necessarily related to the software version number?

[http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Program-Library-
HOWTO.h...](http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Program-Library-
HOWTO.html#AEN46)

~~~
saghm
Ah, okay, I somehow didn't realize that the trailing number referred to the
number in the library file. Thanks!

------
bsder
And we have yet another core infrastructure project that isn't supported and
doesn't get funding.

The real issue is that a lot of people rely on this and _nobody_ is willing to
put anything back toward it.

Apparently we have learned nothing from the OpenSSL debacle.

------
_RPM
Why would the libtiff.org owner not want anything to do with the project?

------
sparky_
RemoteSensing seems to be back up, with a link to
[http://libtiff.org](http://libtiff.org) as its purported new home.

However looking at the mailing list, it seems this domain is not controlled by
the developers.

------
gpvos
We've had this before, when libtiff.org was hijacked, which it still is: it
contains an old version of the libtiff website, with ads.

------
rilut
because @libtiff is already taken on Github, I think libtiff.gitlab.io is okay
enough

~~~
BlackFingolfin
It doesn't seem to be actively used in the past few years, though; isn't there
a process one can use to claim unused github user / org names? Might be worth
talking to GitHub staff about...

~~~
techdragon
There is definitely process and they should apply for it. Hopefully it's free
and not hosting active private repos.

------
L33THaQer
LibTiff.info and LibTiff.io point to one of the available mirrors.

------
kevin_thibedeau
Seems like it's time to host it on a DVCS service so the problem won't be so
disruptive again.

~~~
alrs
Remember sunsite.unc.edu? Sourceforge? Both were the gonna-be-around-forever
source code distribution points of their day.

~~~
sedachv
> Remember sunsite.unc.edu?

That's a throwback. I looked it up and apparently UNC's Sunsite turned into
[http://www.ibiblio.org/about/](http://www.ibiblio.org/about/)

There are a couple of other Sunsites still up. This one looks like it has not
been updated since 1997: [http://sunsite.ubc.ca/](http://sunsite.ubc.ca/)

~~~
tropo
Nah, sunsite is a noob, along with Slackware. When you wanted to download
boot/root, Tamu, or SLS you went to tsx-11.mit.edu or ftp.funet.fi to get it.

------
wyldfire

       /me cringes in fear of a left-pad moment -- what distros can't be built now?
    

Only half joking. ;)

~~~
jdub
Any distro that complies with the GPL will generalise its requirements to
everything else, and thus host original sources for every single package. :-)

~~~
voltagex_
But not necessarily source history + issues plus obscure facts that were only
pointed out once on a mailing list by someone who has since disappeared

------
banachtarski
Tiff? That is a format I haven't heard in a long time.

edit: to everyone replying. TIFF is awful. We have _lossless_ compression now
(read PNG) which is at least a billion times better. We shouldn't use it for
anything in this day and age. Hell, just DEFLATE your TIFF and call it a new
format. It will be better than TIFF

~~~
cooper12
It's commonly used as an archival format since it's not lossy like jpeg.

~~~
matthuggins
JPEG is commonly used in its lossy format, but there's lossless JPEG[1] as
well.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_JPEG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_JPEG)

~~~
acdha
Application support is pretty huge, though: that's what effectively turned
JPEG 2000 into a niche format since the standard was patent and license
encumbered for the first decade and change and the vendors didn't make
interoperability a priority because they assumed the technical merits would
force everyone to adopt it in the end. When you're talking about lossless,
however, it's often in the context of archival storage and people get spooked
after they encounter files which they have trouble opening with perfect
fidelity.

It's a shame since the compression technology was impressive and j2k would
also have made a great progressive image format had browsers supported it.

------
noobermin
For _important_ projects like this (libjpeg, libpng and others) it would make
sense if there was sort of place to get all of them apart from mirrors.

What am I saying, that place[0] exists. Developers shouldn't have to shoulder
the burden of hosting their code if they don't want to or don't wish to
weather the expense. It certainly seems in this case they couldn't pay for
self-hosting (or friend-hosting or whatever this is). I do suppose it is
difficult to move development to a new system though(CVS to git).

[0] [https://github.com/](https://github.com/)

~~~
jcrawfordor
I'm no Stallman, but I'm deeply uncomfortable with how readily everyone is
accepting (and encouraging) GitHub as the complete overlord of open-source
software. As already pointed out, Sourceforge is a cautionary tale of how
these services can go very wrong due to business issues. There's also a much
larger philosophical issue with basing the open-source economy on a
proprietary platform with no particular intent of open-sourcing its core
software.

Yes, GH does a lot of things right, including generally making it easy to
export data form their apps in a reasonably vendor-neutral form. But what
happens when GH runs into financial trouble like SF did? Do we want just about
every project out there to have to struggle to do something with their GitHub
issues?

There are issues with having open-source projects maintain their own
infrastructure, but I think it's the right thing to do wherever possible. It
makes them truly independent in a way that a GitHub repo can never be.

~~~
_RPM
Git is decentralized. GitHub provides free hosting for Git repositories. It's
not like if GitHub dies tomorrow, you would lose all your source code.

~~~
throwanem
You might lose a lot of metadata around it. The comment to which you're
responding mentions issues, which along with pull requests would be a
particular area of concern.

~~~
noobermin
Would it be any different than say a redmine gets lost? Still, the coupling to
GH is still a concern.

------
victormunoz
There exists an alternative to TiffLib called TiffLibrary4java.
[https://github.com/EasyinnovaSL/Tiff-
Library-4J](https://github.com/EasyinnovaSL/Tiff-Library-4J)
[http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.easyinnova/tifflibrary...](http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.easyinnova/tifflibrary4java)

