For nitpicking like that let me do some counter-nitpicking: please write 'Open Source (OSI)', 'Open Source (TM)' or at least capitalize it as 'Open Source' so that people know where you're coming from. The commonly used 'open source' just means 'the source is in the open'. Let's not allow organizations to hijack commonly used words.
Open source has a commonly held definition, it's not nitpicking. I will not let corporations cynically hijack the definition to mean "you can look at the source" the way you suggest.
I don't say it to be pedantic about the term, but there are hard restrictions on usage of this tool in commercial environments.. So it's important people are aware and don't just assume it's an open source.
Right. OSI tried to use their authority to make it seem like AWS's strip mining of the open source ecosystem was the moral high ground. HN has a lot of wishful commercial operators who side with AWS. So they use "open source" lower case as a weapon to harass the open source developers. Personally I tend to side with the developers who try to figure out a way to keep their projects viable.
I think you selected the wrong license. Your license currently as written actually forbids _using_ the software for a commercial purpose, eg if someone monetizes a video edited using your software, they are in violation of your license, which is not what you want.
Look at something like the Hashicorp BSL [1] for inspiration on crafting a license that forbids specific commercialization of the software itself.
Great question! I actually have built a poc that is not released yet. It's on the roadmap. It requires some tooling for the devs building these plugins like a CLI for building the WASM binaries, bundling, manifests, etc.
The current poc still has significant performance overhead, and that overhead grows as the plugin system becomes more powerful. If plugins are only allowed to apply a WGSL shader, the performance impact is almost negligible. But features that require broader access to timeline data, such as time shifts, speed ramps, or full timeline transformations, become much more expensive and make zero-copy architectures harder to reason about.
I added CONTRIBUTING.md. I also took a look at OpenFX. My current view is that supporting OFX in the browser would be hard, since the standard and its existing tooling are not designed around wgpu or browser execution. Tooscut would likely need its own plugin model rather than adopting OFX as is.
That said, I would be very interested in hearing your thoughts if you are open to contributing or discussing what a practical plugin system should look like in this environment. Please file a GitHub issue if you can
If you want free, Resolve will run circles around whatever open source thing you can find. No need for WGPU, it just runs the GPU.
Sadly, things like this just put a bad taste in my mouth about the whole concept of running code in a browser like this. It's buggy as hell. It doesn't run in all browsers. And I really have to ask why we think the browser is the place to run this. We've moved from Java and now to WASM in a browser, but only some browsers.
How does WGPU work on systems with multiple GPUs? Do you not get to config which one is used? That'd be a waste. What about systems with external monitors or even multiple monitors? How do you config what goes on which screen with out some config? Oh, it doesn't handle that? That's professional. How do you setup a control surface without some config? Oh, it doesn't work with control surfaces? That's not very professional either.
In my experience getting it to run on my Intel gpu on Linux was not trivial. And when I did I discovered it doesn't support standard video formats making it a complete non starter.
+1 for Davinci Resolve. I used the free version for years (Windows and Mac versions) before finally picking up a copy of Studio which is still very reasonably priced and is a flat fee.
Browser editing makes sense for review links, shared projects, and zero-install onboarding, but if the job is just cutting footage fast on one machine then a desktop app will smoke it and the compatibility mess buys you nothing. The browser sandbox is a decent distribution hack, yet once you stack WebGPU, WASM, codecs, file access, and browser-specific bugs on top of each other, you are rebuilding a worse native stack with extra failure modes and pretending that counts as progress. Resolve exists.
Black Magic gives video editing software that actual professionals use away for free. They sell professional grade equipment that regular consumers can afford. They also offer a ton of training videos teaching you how to edit professionally....for free. A ton of independent filmmakers have started their career using Black Magic software/devices.
> And I really have to ask why we think the browser is the place to run this.
This is a big barrier if you want cross-compatibility and making Linux usable for everyday people. My whole interface is a terminal and a browser. I could use/pay for something like this in the same way I use figma. I don't need an app and when I open my iPad I can access whatever I was working on.
The browser should have been the place to run all of this from the very start; but Apple/Google decided to create walled gardens for their systems.
