Last night i was browsing the Blender market when i saw an addon for sale that was taken from a free video tutorial and it was undeniable because of certain features that were unmistakable!
I hate these kind of low level opportunists trying to make a dollar over someone else work.
We will see more and more of these guy’s unfortunately since Blender is gaining serious traction now.
If you see them and recognize they just took the work from someone else please boycott the heck out of them.
Don’t ask me which addon i was talking about since i have the decency to never point the finger.
Just leave a comment on the relevant page pointing out that users can write the addon following the publicly available tutorial for themselves and leave it be. There is no problem with someone offering the service of doing the typing for others for money though, frankly.
I have no problem with paid addons that really demand a lot of skills and i like the fact of a continuous development cycle so supporting the developer is logical if the price is reasonable of course.
No, that’s not quite correct. The source code must be made available to people who the addon is distributed to upon request, that is all. Addons are source code of course, so people who buy it are able to distribute it to whoever they want. That doesn’t mean they can distribute other assets included in the addon like textures, models, etc.
That what i was talked about. Source code for blender addons must be aviable for anyone. If author placed his source code at github and then selling it on some sites I’m ok with it.
I think if you start buying addons once, and then giving them away for free it is only going to hurt the blender community that creates addons in the end. While it may not be illegal, that does mean its something we should promote or accept. support your community of devs. @polynut if your goal is to help develop the addon further than I think it is a different story than just buying and redistributing. But at that point why not reach out to the dev who first created it and work with them?
Some people are dumb enough to shoot himself in the feet, dev may take many time, documentation and support also.
Sharing for free when it comes to huge addons is simply killing your own tools.
But i must agree that there are many over priced 5 lines code toys in today’s market, so we should make a balance. Perhaps a rating based on dev effort estimation vs pricing could be a good starting point.
Sorry this is how GPL works. Source codes MUST be aviable for anyone. And I think this is good. People should have ability to learn from others to make their work better. Someone wrote good addon - made blender better, but other guy learned from this addon - built even better addon and blender become even better! Everyone wins. And if author wants to get money - let him sell his addon. I don’t mind.
I think you make a good point. Personally I would like to see more devs have patreon type funding. You find a dev you like who does work that applies to you and you support them directly. getting access to their tools and allowing them to give it to everyone else for cheaper if not free. Like the blender development fund but you get to chose who exactly the money goes too.
