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Nebulosity is now open-source and free
- NKosmatos 5y agoNebulosity is a very good cross-platform capture and processing astrophotography software. From the Stark Labs webpage: "Nebulosity has gone open-source[0] and free. Here is a code to unlock Nebulosity if you don’t download[1] the open-source build: N4-14627-55834-23500-59673". [0] https://github.com/celstark/OpenNebulosity https://github.com/celstark/OpenNebulosity [1] http://www.stark-labs.com/downloads.html http://www.stark-labs.com/downloads.html
- api 5y agoUnfortunately this is often a signal of something shutting down.
- sildur 5y agoYeah, like OpenOffice, or Blender, or Java, or UQM.
- marcodiego 5y agoOpenOffice, Blender and Java were in "full steam" development when they were open sourced. Actually, the company developing Blender had some financial difficulties, but its development was running nevertheless.
- cinntaile 5y agoCan you tell us something about the percentage of projects that made a successful transition? At this point it is hard to tell whether your examples are survivorship bias or not.
- sildur 5y agoI tried to, but I didn’t find a list of projects that went open source, so I had to go by my memory. Which may have some kind of survivorship bias, as I maybe forgot those projects which went open source, but failed.
- SloopJon 5y agoThis is not a category of software that I'm familiar with, so I don't know how Nebulosity compares to its competitors, free or proprietary. My intuition says that 71,000 lines of C and C++ code is manageable for a person or group with the right motivation. One thing that puts a clock on it in the intermediate to long term is camera support, which I gather from the README is a significant maintenance task. The project will bleed users if it doesn't support their new cameras. Edit: it looks like Nebulosity sold for $95. Some other software in this space I see mentioned on the Cloudy Nights forum are Astro Pixel Processor (€ 165), PixInsight (€ 165), and Siril (free).
- solarkraft 5y agoIt does seem to me like the author doesn't expect to sell many more licenses and perhaps wants to wind down his work on it. This can definitely endanger a project (especially previously a one man show, bus factor and all). But instead of a fairly certain death, they have chosen to give the community a chance to keep working on it, which can succeed and help make Nebulosity the de-facto standard in its category.
- leephillips 5y agoAnything like this is great news, but this program doesn’t run on any free operating systems.
- squarefoot 5y agoGive it some time. Obscurity and restrictive licenses are the main obstacles preventing ports to open systems, and the author removed both.
- solarkraft 5y agoThere's hope this will change :-)
- marcodiego 5y agoLast commit is from November 7 2020. Seems abandoned and open sourced so it could endure a bit longer. Fortunately there are good FLOSS multi-platform astronomy software already.
- yccs27 5y agoThe name kind of sounds like a mash-up of education streaming platforms Nebula + Curiosity Stream. Maybe I have just seen too many sponsored video segments...
- Nextgrid 5y agoLet me introduce you to our latest sponsor: https://sponsor.ajay.app https://sponsor.ajay.app - one sponsor to rule them all! (this is an adblock-style extension that blocks sponsored segments using a community-maintained database)
- easygenes 5y agoIs this because N.I.N.A. Is already open source and has kind of already taken over this niche?
- NKosmatos 5y agoFor others not familiar with it, NINA stands for Nighttime Imaging 'N' Astronomy and is available from https://nighttime-imaging.eu https://nighttime-imaging.eu