libopenraw is an ongoing project to provide a free software 
implementation for camera RAW files decoding. One of the main 
reason is that dcraw is not suited for easy integration into 
applications, and there is a need for an easy to use API to 
build free software digital image processing application.

It also has the goal to address missing feature from dcraw 
like meta-data decoding and easy thumbnail extraction.

libopenraw requires boost (a SlackBuild script is available at
SlackBuilds.org)