Can open source get in the way?

By ldsandon, 21 December, 2010

As I lately get a couple of Canon digital cameras, I cannot ask myself why the Canon Raw Codec still does not support Windows 64 bit. Looking at their install file, I found references to libjpeg and expat, none of which looks to be very 64 bit Windows-friendly. The latter has only a "win32" download for Windows, while the former although having makefiles for Visual Studio 2010 seems to lack a makefile to compile a 64 bit version. It looks very strange Canon cannot deliver a 64 bit codec - IMHO unless it relies on external code which is not available in a 64 bit flavour (although some unofficial ports look to exist), and they do not want to port themselves, although a company like Canon should, or at least pay someone to do it, if this is the reason and they have many angry customers because of that. Otherwise it would have been better to rely on commercial libraries. I believe Canon could afford that... <G>