For anyone unfamiliar with Pillow, it is the friendly PIL fork: a fork of PIL that aims to remain a good citizen in the PIL community through its actions.
Warm and fluffy history
Pillow 1.0 was released on 2010-07-31, a little over a year later came Pillow 1.7.5 which features:
- Many packaging fixes (mostly to support dependency libraries)
- Windows binaries
- Over 13K downloads
Pillow is used in Plone’s UnifiedInstaller, and I know folks from the Django communityare using it.
Future creature comforts
All in all, a mild success. So what’s next? More of the same. To quote myself from a recent Stack Overflow answer:
If PIL ever does exactly what Pillow does, then the fork will die. Until that happens, we have Pillow.
Bottom line accommodations
This may never happen of course, which is part of the reason for the fork. You can’t force someone to maintain software for you. But in the open source world you can grab the bull by the horns (take the lead) and try to make things better. Even better: if your project and community are healthy and functioning properly, your success or failure will be determined by the folks in the community (as it should be). In this case, the Plone and Python communities have spoken clearly.