Free market… sell your own stuff that interfaces with blenders API via a dual license would be the simplest solution – and it would encourage some developers to invest more time. Some can’t invest more then they do now because they need a day job. But don’t we all?
Looking back on the thread, I think people are confused about opensource.
Paying for something does not necessarily make it private, and I think this fact is a major element of the concept of opensource. Of course someone could commission some development work on their own dime and never release it – one could do this right now, without any input from the Foundation – but they could never sell their modified version of Blender, thanks to the GPL. It is impossible for anyone anywhere to ever make a profit from Blender.
It is fallacy, however, to have the opinion of the community matter equally or more than that of the financier (whoever puts up the money), when it comes to the financier’s money. The financier would be paying for a feature to be developed into Blender, which is and always will be free as in freedom and free as in beer.
Some distant benefactor would be spending their own money, paying a third party coder to develop this feature for themselves and you and everybody. Their money would go toward a new feature which could be used by rival studios, written in code that could be stolen by commercial companies, but definitely would be available free on the 'net for anybody to download and make pornography or Shakespeare with, forever.
AFAIK, the only APIs that exist are for the sequence and texture plugins and Python. Please correct me if I am wrong but then the creation of a C API would be necessary. Otherwise aren’t patches applied against the GPLd Blender code forced to be GPL themselves… again correct me, I’m no lawyer.
Interestingly enough, it has always been possible to create Python scripts that would have a closed source license and to sell them.
Jean
It seems to me that there is no other way than to state in the contract that the intellectual rights would go to the Foundation and the license would have to be GPL. Then the trouble would pretty much be nil.
Am I wrong?
Maybe not the “intelectual rights”, those could go to the contracted developer, but I think that a GPL license would save investors a lot of headaches with legalities. If the investors want profits they would not be simply “collecting money to buy a feature”, they would be starting some kind of commercial association (and an international one), with legal responsibilities.
That’s why I think simple is less pain. Most of those who invest would simply give money and forget about the whole thing until the feature is there. I believe there will be more people willing to do something simple and effective than people wanting to engage in some complex international commercial relationship.
Note: when I said “Give participation to the whole community to express interest.”. It was meant just in a way to “listen the community”, “integrate listening opinions”, not to give those who doesn’t invest the same control as the investors over what is done and what is not. That control is of course in hands of the investors.
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I know that this is the situation for the development made by volunteers. As for paid developers the example of what happens when Brecht or Campbell or even Ton code would give us a clue.
Jean
Would you have done either of these for 250 dollars if you didn’t have the inclination to work on those things in the first place?
If not, then it would illustrate the problem with bounties as I see it. The people most suited for tackling these feature requests are usually involved anyway, and working in your free time usually means you would rather only do what interests you. The money wasn’t on the table and you did the work anyway.
Paying for blender development is certainly possible and has been done several times before, I just don’t know if the bounty model is the way to do it.
Cheers,
Briggs
Not to single you out on this, but I make a profit from Blender* and I support any opportunity for the devs to make money as well, even if they would do the work for free.
*Ok, so its more like “save money”, but that savings rolls directly into profits.
Edit to clarify a bit: I dont think that its unreasonable at all for people to make money with Blender the same way money is made with other opensource projects. Instead of selling the software, you sell service for the software. When we keep talking about how great it would be if Blender was the “industry standard”, isnt that what were really envisioning? All the top Blender artists and devs are suddenly in demand and being paid good money for working with and improving Blender in commercial projects? If thats not what people want they should really stop caring one bit what the “industry” does and what software it uses.
Maybe donating for specific features shouldn’t be the focus. Maybe we should rather look into sponsoring specific programmers. If a person develops a report by starting with little things and advancing, showing they have developed an in depth knowledge of the code base, then they would be good candidates for starting pledge drives to support them full time for a certain length of time.
Ideally, it would grow to a point where production companies would take an interest in blender and hire on the blender developers full time to promote development in the areas that serve their interest.
A good way to get production companies involved is to co-sponsor a developer with them. Most production companies are probably not familiar with this OSS development model, so it would reduce the risk they take on when the developer is co-sponsored by the community.
I think the question is not that much what any user would like to see in Blender but rather “what are companies interested to see in blender”.
Anyone who don’t like these kind of sponsored features can compile his/her own Blender.
We are really interested in Blender and depending on the features there might be a thing we really would like to develop or let to be developed.
I think there are other 3D related companies also, that might want some features or etc. to be in Blender (official) release.
For example I think there should be a Blender with much simpler interface and with not that many clever shortcut keys and I would be ready to sponsor creating this kind of version.
Ack! I meant “by selling Blender,” like as a retail commercial software package. It is impossible for anyone anywhere to ever make a profit by selling Blender.
Minor nitpicking: this is technically incorrect. The GPL does not prohibit others from distributing or selling a modified version of Blender. It only requires that if you distribute, you also release the source code. In practice, I don’t imagine you’d be unlikely to get many buyers since the code is freely available anyway, but the GPL doesn’t prohibit it. (From time to time, people angrily post links of people “illegally” selling Blender. It’s not at all illegal, although poaching copyrighted images as such sellers often do certainly is illegal.)
Thats very true Nicholas. Some people really just like paying for things, even when they dont have to and the money is going to the wrong people.
Edit: Reading through some of the comments there is pretty funny tho.
“I first tried the version you download from the Ubuntu website but my computer would not boot off a homemade boot disk, no matter how hard I tried. I bought the program from Bestbuy and my pc booted Ubuntu the first time.”
Im just imagining this guy straining really hard to get Ubuntu to install, hitting his head against the monitor, banging on the keyboard with a stick, taking out a magic marker and drawing smiley faces on the disk. Finally, he gives up and pays BestBuy 20$ for no particular reason.
Yes. Many seem to think it’s all about the rights to download and use the software for free, without ever paying anything.
Most seem to forget that the OSS “model” is about collaboration (wether you do that by paying, programming features yourself or doing work on documentation), whereas the OSS “license” is about keeping all of that work out there without the ability to close it down if you’re not the author of every line of code.
But hey, it’s free…
Developer time is free too…
And places to live are also very freely available!
I think someone should change the acronym for OSS into something like “F(r)ee Software” (FS), because, well… if you don’t pay any fees (in any way, doesn’t have to be money), there’s no OSS either.
Note that the Best Buy version includes 60 days of professional support. Actually so called “added value” model is quite often used when it comes to business based on Open Source software. Most prominent examples in case of Linux distributions besides Ubuntu are Red Hat and SuSE to mention some. You can consider additional documentation such as books, training DVDs, courses etc. to fit into this model too.
To not get too much off topic I have a couple of questions for you to answer:
- How do you determine that the feature to be implemented has been sufficiently implemented? Which sort of acceptance metrics do you use? Does this mean that for the employee to get paid, the feature must be committed in the main development branch of Blender?
- How do coordinate the maintenance of the new features? Most of the time spent in software development goes traditionally to maintenance. Some say that even as much as 80 percent of all time used is just maintenance work. According to Lehman’s laws time spent on maintenance as the software becomes more complex increases unless this is taken carefully into count by keeping it manageable. In other words non glamorous refactoring work which doesn’t yield new features is essential for software evolution. Are you planning to fund this work as well?
I don’t think it is bad that people get paid for developement. I just don’t think this should be done through a bounty model maintained by the Blender Foundation.
The problem is as soon as money comes into the game things start to go haywire and things become biased.
So I think the best way would be to find a developer on your own and pay him. Once he is done you post the changes to the Blender Foundation and let the normal patch tracking mechanism takes place. If you want to make sure that additions get added to the main trunk you should also contact Ton and ask what you have to do in order to ensure addition to trunk.
In the contract with the developer you should make sure that you have stuff like maintainance covered and rights on the source code. Since you are coding against the blender source code you will have to use the GPL license.
your questions are way ahead of time and only experience will really tell.
So any answer can only be speculation and a bit vague.
The implementation of a feature cannot be made without the collaboration and ultimately the assent of the Foundation, unless one can fork Blender or deal with patching it for a long time… In any case an organization will have to intervene and may have to be created… not a small feat in the second case, so I guess that there will be a large measure of reliance on the Foundation anyway.
Which sort of acceptance metrics do you use? Does this mean that for the employee to get paid, the feature must be committed in the main development branch of Blender?
good question which really underline that the users who want to fund a specific part of the development can’t be all “code virgins”? They have to be able to judge if the proposed implementation plan is viable and if the actual implementation is clean enough to be maintained easily. It is more that likely that, except for the simplest features, a schedule of implementation will have to be established, with functional code at the end of each step that can be paid.
This work is simplified if the Foundation is part of the project, clearly, but there are other powerful organizations and companies out there and quite a lot of passionate and savvy users here too, all who could, theoretically, manage those efforts.How do coordinate the maintenance of the new features? Most of the time spent in software development goes traditionally to maintenance. Some say that even as much as 80 percent of all time used is just maintenance work. According to Lehman’s laws time spent on maintenance as the software becomes more complex increases unless this is taken carefully into count by keeping it manageable. In other words non glamorous refactoring work which doesn’t yield new features is essential for software evolution. Are you planning to fund this work as well?
How is the maintenance done right now? What proportion of the whole coding work does it occupy? And what is maintenance and what is new development anyway? For example, is Briggs’ project one or the other or both? I think the latter. Then how to quantify in what proportions?
I don’t think that the way Blender is coded and maintained has to change that much simply because features are sometimes issued out of a funding effort, do you? Right now it is the original coder that is purveying the maintenance and evolution work or someone else who takes over when the former “disappears” ; it could be, ultimately, that whatever organization that is managing the funding will still manage the maintenance but…
…the case of funded projects is not new to Blender and indeed much of the development that happened during Orange, Peach and Apricot has been funded one way or another with the Foundation coordinating it.
I wonder if we are not simply assisting to a responsibilization of the user base under the pressure of economic reality. The primary organism that can coordinate the development is the Foundation but with the accelerated pace taken by Blender it will need more money, sooner than later.
There is a lot of good discussion points in what you say.
Only this still intrigues me :
For the moment this is, to me, and unfunded declaration (pun intended). Could you explain, expand, exemplify ?
Jean
Well the reason I’m saying this is basically based on personal experience so I can’t really give real world examples but when money comes into the game people start taking up rights which by vritue of the used licenses they don’t have.
Let’s say A asks B to develope something for blender. B does his job and gives the code to A. Now A submits this code to the BF. The BF integrates it. After a while errors occur and the BF has to take out the code. Now A is going to be pissed since he paid for something that is no longer in the code. The problem here is A thinks he has a case but neither B nor the BF have any obligations. B has done his work and unless the contract dictates him to correct the errors he is out of the game.
The BF never had a contract with A and his code submission was on a free bases (GPL) BF is not obligated to include nor maintaine the code further. But since A paid for the feature he thins he has a right to it.
Hope that made things clear.
Put another way: People tend to think they have a right to have certain things in OS which per se isn’t true. They own the right to use the code freely but they do not have a right for the code to do what they want it to do. As long as nobody is paying for it nobody will complain but when money comes into the game people start to think just because they paid for it they have more rights. It basically runs along the same line as others have stated before: Just because you paid doesn’t give you any more rights then anybody else.
Quite.
Thanks for your time.
Jean
musk: actually, someone paying for something (or doing it themself – either way they “own” the action in purely economic terms) does give them more rights to it, and that is built right into the GPL. As the owner of that bit of code, they have the right to keep it for themselves or to release it. If they want to really reserve their right to it, there is nothing that says they ever have to let it out of their hands. Neither the feature nor the code ever has to see the light of day outside of their home or business.
Of course, if they were to distribute the binaries with that feature, then they would be obligated to share the code under the terms of the GPL.
I think you see money and payment as something more than it is. Payment is simply a means of obtaining ownership, of the exact same type that I obtain when I write original code. Did I write it myself or buy it? In purely economic terms, it doesn’t matter. It’s still mine. If I choose to release it under the GPL, it doesn’t matter what rights I think I have – I am bound by the license. And so would anyone be who was the owner of a piece of code, either by original creation or by payment.
I think the fact that almost all Blender devs choose to automatically put their code into trunk, distribute it under GPL, etc., gets everyone thinking that that’s the only way it can go. I can develop a feature, use it on my own projects, and black hole it for everyone else. Perfectly legit in the GPL, and $$$ never even got involved. But still probably a crappy way to be. Don’t let the generosity of everyone who develops for Blender lead you to believe that the people who wrote the code don’t own the code. They do.