Hi David, I can only give you a technical and a community viewpoint on this. I am no professional on GPL-licensing.
I see some community-'issues' with this. * The benefit for Blender community is better adoption. (in business terms a weak benefit) * You propose Blender community effort is needed (designing and developing C-extensions and licensing, perhaps support, documentation etc). * Commercial parties will benefit. (sounds like better benefit than point 1) I think this might only be realistic to do from a Blender-network kind of thing, but you always need a company who wants it (who is willing to invest in it or take the risk). Do you have contact with such a company? IMO the C-extension for commercial purposes should be developed by a commercial party and not by the OS-community. You can even think of releasing only this part under an GPL license. Jeroen. On 11/13/2010 08:35 AM, David Jeske wrote: > I understand I'm following up on a discussion from last month. I think it's > an important one. There were many good points raised about the license > requirements for extensions. I hope these additional thoughts are a well > received. > > I think it will benefit the Blender community if commercial companies can > use Blender as a replacement for commercial tools. In order to do this, it's > often necessary for them to link propritary code in as extension modules, > and make use of them deeply in their rendering and/or asset management > process. This discussion brought up the point that it's "probably fine" to > write propritary extension modules, especially if it's done in the privacy > of a company. However, please understand the conservative environment of > corporations. All corporate council I'm aware of will advise against > linking proprietary code to GPL code as a potential GPL violation. This will > make it an un-viable corporate risk. Or put differently, the legal safety of > commercial alternatives is simply worth too much. Which means they will use > commercial tools instead of blender. Which is a lost opportunity for the > adoption of excellent users that would help advance blender. "truly free" > open source tools like Python are more accepted in corporate environments > for this specific reason. > > I think it will benefit Blender's adoption substantially if the Blender code > licensing is structured in a way to make it very safe and indisputable that > it's okay to build closed-source extensions with proprietary code. I > understand it may be important to draw this line carefully. In my opinion it > will be worth the effort. > > I don't know the blender community or blender foundation position on > for-sale binary extension modules for Blender, and I understand this may be > a tricky issue. However, regardless of the stance on this, I think it will > be of great benefit if companies feel safe in linking their own code with > blender inside their own environment. In my experience, this is not > generally accepted as a valid thing to do with GPL code and the current > interpretations of the GPL. > > I understand this also may not be the biggest priority at the moment, but I > think it's an important issue that deserves some serious consideration. > > Thanks again to all of you for helping to make Blender such a great > success! > _______________________________________________ > Bf-committers mailing list > Bf-committers@blender.org > http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers > _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list Bf-committers@blender.org http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers