On Thu, Nov 25, 2010 at 8:55 AM, Campbell Barton <ideasma...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, All things considered I'm apathetic towards LGPL switch. > > Its still quite restrictive, and I'm not aware of any commercial > extensions for blender so far, even though its possible to write them > without changing to LGPL. > > > May I point out that existing blender developers are not pushing for > this, one might consider if they had trouble feeding their families > that this would be of interest to them. > > So with a less restrictive license I would write a commercial plugin > for blender, sit back and earn an income, right? > > The thing is, I don't want to make money this way, even if I could > earn more then GPL dev. Its just not a fun way to do development, so > it would make me less interested to be a blender developer if this is > the kind of people we have to interact with on the mailing list, irc, > etc. > > I think we can better focus on services and support model for income, > it may earn less short term but we will have more satisfied users.
Well for a thread which has been apparently dropped it certainly seems to be an interesting an active topic. And I must say that when the thread started I was rather unhappy with the general tone of the responses but as things have progressed I think the responses have gotten a lot better even though they are still generally anti-LGPL. So I would like to reply to this latest batch of responses, but I'm not trying to reopen the debate, I consider the debate to be closed. @Knapp. Thomas Prashant Campbell I completely negative feeling towards the Windows system, that was my experience as well, and it has also been my experience since switching to linux years ago that I have felt better about my system not running on stolen software. But when you say this: "Letting people take that community effort and use it for their own personal benefit without giving back to that same community is a bit wrong IMOHO" Artists take it and use it and generally do not give back. Writers take it and use it and generally do not give it back. Web users take it and use it and generally do not give back. Office users take it and use it and generally do not give back. You are making one exception, programmers, they must not use it unless they give back 100%. But what I am saying is that there is likely a group of programmers who will simply not _ever_ use it if they are forced to play by those rules. Now ask yourself, why do we release free software for closed environments like Windows, and Macs? Is it not because although we do not agree with those closed environments we know that a good way to get people to switch to an open model is to allow them use it and test it and slowly make the change to a free platform? What I am saying is that there would be two similar benefits to closed extensions. First, programmers who right now would not consider developing an extension for blender because of the GPL might consider it since they might view it as an opportunity to make money. Don't be upset with that view, artists look at Blender with just as greedy eyes, and similarly office users look at Libreoffice (openoffice) the same way, it is an opportunity for them to make or save money. There is nothing wrong with a programmer who wants to make/save money. Second, if these programmers do develop an extension for Blender they may become invested in Blenders future, if Blender becomes more popular then they have more opportunity to sell their extension, so they suddenly want Blender to become more popular. They see that Blender has a bug, so they contribute some code to Blender to fix it. Remember, Blender itself will always be open source, any change to Blender itself must be made public if any of the code is distributed. This is what has happened with Linux, do you think IBM really cares about open source? I don't. I think they care about money. They make money with Linux and so they are invested in Linux's future, they want Linux to be as good as it possibly could be because then they make more money so they have been actively contributing open source code to Linux for years, and they see their profits go up. I doubt there is an IBM out there for Blender just waiting to contribute, but what if there is a single programmer and one or two of his friends who want to make a small company and they are interested in the 3D modeling/animation/design industry. Right now they would look at Blender and say wow wouldn't that be great, too bad it is GPL, and so then they would go and start working on a 3DMax extension, or a Maya extension. It is no problem for them, they can just pick another platform, it is a problem for us because they didn't pick ours. The existing Blender developers (see Campbells most recent email) have said that they would not want to write closed extensions anyway so people who are worried that allowing closed extensions would somehow lessen Blender developers are wrong, it would only increase Blender developers by bringing new people into the market and making them invested in Blenders future. I have nothing against a services and support model, in fact that is probably something I will try to do eventually. But I want to see Blender become as good as it can be, I just think this would be one way that would help Blender in the long run. The better Linux becomes the more people see it as a way to make/save money (web developers, artists, writers) and the same with programmers, we shouldn't shut them out. _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list Bf-committers@blender.org http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers