> LibreSprite originated as a fork of Aseprite, developed by David Capello. Aseprite used to be distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2, but was moved to a proprietary license on August 26th, 2016.
> This fork was made on the last commit covered by the GPL version 2 license, and is now developed independently of Aseprite.
Also I am not really sure if you can convince me that this is a open source license: https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/blob/main/EULA.txt
Not that it is a unreasonable license, but it is not open source.
[0]: https://github.com/LibreSprite/LibreSprite?tab=readme-ov-fil...
This is one case where we really should support the original product, you can buy a perpetual licence of a pittance and they just 2 guys chugging along.
LibreSprite has 5000 commits, 30 in the past year whilst ASEPrite has over 10000 at this point.
Libresprite is an important project because people can fork it and learn from it by extending it, and submit those patches upstream, regardless of how active it is.
A fork of the old version to have a slightly better version conveniently available in package repos would be nice. I don't think it has to catch up with Aseprite to be useful.
It's good to support honest and high quality proprietary software.
Aseprite offers the latter good, this offers the former good.
2. It’s okay for two projects to do the same thing, even if you personally prefer one over the other.
You might be confusing license with access. The product itself has a proprietary license. Even then, a majority of the libraries they produce are also available under the MIT license.
"source available"[1] is a different thing, and you're right that this project is "source available".
[0]: https://opensource.org/osd
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software
Their EULA forbids distributing the software, hence not open source.
I highly recommend paying for Aseprite, it's a very good little tool.