On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 1:13 PM, Dan Eicher <d...@trollwerks.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 9:09 AM, David Jeske <dav...@gmail.com> wrote: > > ...I'm beginning to feel like a minority in wanting Blender to one day > > become a real disruptive open-source alternative to these commercial > tools. > > > > And why does Blender need to change it's license to do this? > > You seem to equate 'success' with blender having a secondary > 'proprietary plugin' market and a bit of FUD over the GPL thrown in for > good > measure. > I equate "success" with Blender having users, and a stable product. My comments on the GPL are not FUD, they are reporting the reality of the decisions companies make today. FUD would be trying to convince them to stay away from GPL software. Arguing that it's theoretically possible for them to be safe linking their closed code to the GPL is sort of an irrelevant point in this discussion if most of them choose not to do it -- regardless of the reasons. I believe it's important to many users (especially, but not limited to corporate users) to have a secondary 'proprietary plugin market', because they get benefit from being able to buy those plugins and use them to get work done, instead of waiting for a community to author them, or trying to sink lots of their own resources into developing them. The open source community would eventually do what it always tries to do, and copy the commercial plugins, which is totally fine. The commercial companies have to keep innovating to stay ahead of 'free and open source', and open-source gets better all the time. This virtuous cycle doesn't happen if they can't even start. Oh, and friend who says 'Blender wouldn't be good enough today even if the > license was fixed'. > We all know this to be true. Is there someone who thinks differently? I want to see a world where Blender is good enough to replace Maya. > I suppose it would be different if these studios could make and distribute > their own changes (to make Blender 'good enough') without having to give > these changes back to the community? > That's not what I'm suggesting at all. What you are describing is more like the BSD/Python/artistic licenses, which are a free-for-all. I'm advocating the LGPL. The LGPL requires any changes you make **TO THE CODEBASE** to be distributed. It simply allows you to link your own binaries into the same address space, depend on material details, and distribute those binaries to other parties without requiring you to distribute source for YOUR code. In other words, I could make a DLL/so by linking against blender.h and distribute my binary, to run in the same address space, without releasing source for my binary. Moreso, as a company I could be comfortable linking this code with my closed code, because LGPL code can be linked into commercial products without releasing the entire commercial product. For example, if I made an interesting game using the Blender Game Engine, I could sell my game as a binary with my only obligation to release the source to all components of the Blender Game Engine I used, as well as any improvements or changes I made to that code. My game-code could remain closed and sold as a for-profit binary. _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list Bf-committers@blender.org http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers