This is something that has been playing on my mind a bit. The project is making great strides to 1.0 all the time. PhotoFiltre LX Studio and PhotoFiltre LX(free) will be released in the not so far future which is absolutely fantastic! However, a project that started off as Open Source needed to make sacrifices in the name of progress. We got our funding and started commercial development to kick off the project. We have been continuing progress with more cost involved but the issue here is I don’t have the same free time I used to for project development.
I do want to return to Open Source, right where the project roots started. Really though the project needs to make back a certain amount of the high value source code before I could even consider it worthwhile/fair to be releasing to the community. The road back will be a difficult one but every sale of PhotoFiltre LX Studio is actually contributing back to a prospect of a code release to Open Source.
Best solution going forward will be a optional donation for the free version which will eventually be released after Studio sales decline substantially. I’m just putting my thoughts out there. Provide feedback if you have an opinion on the matter or if you do care about whether this project has an Open Source version or not. For now I will put a progress bar on the downloads page, so we can track progress on the possibility of Open Sourcing the code base.