Are there license issues with integrating .obj export into Blender's source?

Coding Beginning Blender Code and Development
1

Hi all, I’m curious whether there are license issues preventing integration of export of certain types of file formats into Blender’s source. Since there are some, like .obj, .ply, etc., that are used by many external renderers and so forth, it would be nice to have the speed of C++ for that kind of file writing.

But are there license problems with that kind of integration? What, primarily, would be (or is) preventing that?

2

I couldn’t find the right mailing list discussion, but you can find some info in this thread:

http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2013-January/038698.html

And these two mails:
http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2013-July/041117.html
http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2013-July/041118.html

Summary:

  • native I/O would be a lot faster
  • since there’s no plugin API, entire blender needs to be compiled with importer/exporter code
  • there was a GSoC project to integrate ASSIMP, but never made it to trunk (incomplete / not maintained / missing docs?)
  • python scripts are really useful, since scripters can learn from it or adapt for format variations / base custom I/O addons on it
  • python scripts + native I/O would probably confuse users
  • there are license issues with certain formats, e.g. FBX, which isn’t really documented. Available importers/exporters are based on a FBX SDK, which isn’t compatible with GPL