It’s sad to see some trying to openly shut down others online-free speech and projects for the sake of “open” source licensing. That’s not really open nor stands for freedom it’s quite an ironic situation isn’t it?
Absolutely. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of the GPL - I prefer more permissive licenses like MIT. But it’s an important conversation to have because there are a lot of people in the community who just use Blender and don’t care or simply don’t know about the licensing or other “nitty-gritty” developer details
Me too
Why is blender not under MIT? did Ton ever talk about that?
Most people don’t care about blender being GPL, if we would run a poll across the actual user community (and not devs) of a question such as '“Would you still love blender if blender was not lisenced GPL” there would be 95% of yes. That’s the truth IMO, users don’t love GPL they love blender. Blender does not represent the success of GPL it represents the success of a free, cool & useful sofware managed by a community of people.
Most people who produce plugins which are under GPL, the most successful ones, operate under that model. The ones who produce one plugin once and expect it to roll in forever… I can’t think of one example of those.
yeah and it’s a miracle that some can actually live off their plugin & continue in their innovation and pursue of concept. thanks to the respectful community i guess. How long will it last before the whole blender entrepreneur ecosystem fall down? Only one guy can destroy everything by sharing all blendermarket addons for free on a new website, that all it takes and everything is dead, not only addon-developpers but tons of people living off this ecosystem such as youtubers and third party websites.
The idea of GPL is that people who use and benefit from work of others will also contribute back to that project. MIT gives full access to any and all just take that work and contribute nothing back.
The FSF is infamous for very strictly interpreting the GPL. People can and do differ over what “whole program” means; there was a time when the BF itself took the stance that python scripts did not count and scripts did not have to be GPL.
As far as I know the question of what “whole program” means in the context of the GPL has never been tested in court. Part of the reason blender no longer has any meaningful C plugin API is because it was thought that binary plugins–which link directly into the blender executable–did fit the definition of “whole program.”
Personally I disagree with the FSF that an embedded interpreted scripting language counts as a “whole program,” at least for the purposes of GPL v2. All of my add-ons have been GPL-compliant so it’s not been an issue for me personally.
Speaking personally I do think people have a right to earn a living. Those of us in the late Millennial generation had this right denied to us for many years. Instead we were asked to do things for other people for little or no reward, whether it’s going into debt to attend pathetic American universities that are basically fraudulent (and everyone knows it) or doing lots of unpaid volunteer work.
No.
Blender as a whole is licensed and distributed under the GPL license. Any derivatives of it must be published under GPL license too. It does not matter what parts of Blender you changed. If you distribute a build of Blender, you must provide the source code of the exact build you’re distributing.
The Apache license under which Cycles is, is GPL compatible - that means, it can be used in a GPL licensed program and distributed under the GPL license without it being a violation of the Apache license.
And I continue to simply think: “We all should be in this together. A rising tide lifts all boats.”
Blender – and open-source software in general – exists because it distributes and absorbs the prodigious human costs of developing and maintaining computer software. The whole is much greater than the sum of its parts. Cooperative software development allows us all to collectively achieve things that otherwise could never be accomplished, because each subsequent developer is able to build upon what has been freely shared – and then, to share it.
We can achieve things that by themselves “would not be profitable” by not demanding that we profit. Remember: “NaN, Inc.,” the original commercial developers of Blender, fell into bankruptcy. The creditors didn’t have to let their asset go … and, if they hadn’t, none of this would have ever happened. Blender would have died then and there as a “worthless, failed,” software project, soon to be forgotten.
What I’ve gathered from reading this is you have to distribute the source code in some way if Blender code is in there somewhere. No one really knows if it’s before or after purchase, but it should be available in some way. If it only uses Cycles then you don’t have to give source code as Cycles is under a different license. This is how Cycles 4D is able to be made for Cinema 4D.
I get the feeling the Blender license is really only there so a big company doesn’t take the Blender code, as is, then improve with a ton of cash, slap a new label, say pay for this, then after people switch stop all development thus killing Blender all together. This could greatly hurt Blender because people always want to use the best and might actually switch. Understandable as a slight improvement could mean saving a ton of time for the artist. Blender doesn’t want to be hijacked. K or E cycles are enhancing Blender not replacing Blender so I don’t see the Blender Foundation caring about what they are doing. I’m not a lawyer though, so really who knows. Not even lawyers know till after the court case plus all appeals are done. Then, years later, it could change again. Short answer is it’s complicated.
My understanding is that E/K-Cycles have to provide this to anyone who purchases it, not anyone who requests it.
I believe a contentious area was if I have a copy of E-Cycles that wasn’t purchased, I can still request a copy from the developer, rather than whoever gave me my copy.
I do not think this could happen as you state.
The problem is not a big company stealing blenders code or using parts of it, the big problem would be a company claiming ownership of the code and closing its source.
Big companies in this industry already have their own code that in areas is arguably better and more efficient.
Even if a big company tried to do this it would not kill Blender as Blender would still be open source (which is why the licence is the way it is).
Most Blender users would not swap to a hijacked paid version.
Cycles 4D has not and will not kill Blenders cycles.
pretty sure that was in part because blender back then included the game engine and game logic scripts were effectively considered content vis-à-vis blender artistic license.
