About#

Goals#

The fork author’s goal is to foster and support active development of PIL through:

License#

Like PIL, Pillow is licensed under the open source HPND License

Why a fork?#

PIL is not setuptools compatible. Please see this Image-SIG post for a more detailed explanation. Also, PIL’s current bi-yearly (or greater) release schedule is too infrequent to accommodate the large number and frequency of issues reported.

What about PIL?#

Note

Prior to Pillow 2.0.0, very few image code changes were made. Pillow 2.0.0 added Python 3 support and includes many bug fixes from many contributors.

As more time passes since the last PIL release (1.1.7 in 2009), the likelihood of a new PIL release decreases. However, we’ve yet to hear an official “PIL is dead” announcement.