Noticed this in my distro’s repo today (fedora) and figured I’d bring some attention to it. Asesprite is the premier pixel art tool, so it’s awesome to see someone keeping the FOSS version alive!
There’s also a great book from NoStarchPress made for Asesprite, and assumes absolutely no previous artistic knowledge!
What’s the difference between the OG Aseprite and all the forks like this one? Genuine question
The forks are based off an older version, and received less development compared to the OG after stopped being FOSS. A serious artist or gamedev would likely appreciate the additional features of the OG, but the forks are free, and still retain much of what made aseprite so good, making them more than adequate to learn with or any pixel art amateur.
We use OG version at our school but will introduce this instead. I try to implement use of foss where possible in my teaching. S little unrelated but very good CAD alternatives to fusion 360 that has a similar “easy” GUI? Blender is ok but not really a CAD tool.
FreeCAD is probably what you’re looking for, it had a bad UI but just released 1.0 recently and is pretty decent now. Also I really recommend checking Pixelorama over libresprite for a FOSS pixel art tool.
I’d heard of pixelorama a few years ago when it was released, but looking at it now, it looks like it’s come a long way, very impressive.
If your question is about the legal difference: this fork is licensed as GPL 2 (free libre open-source software), while the OG is proprietary (albeit source-available).
This means that everyone is allowed to do anything with this version and nobody can ever prevent them from doing so, while the OG doesn’t have such freedom.
The original authors might one day decide to halt the development and pull the source code, and/or decide to start “enshittifying” Aseprite, but LibreSprite will forever remain free and available to everyone.