I was looking arround at turbosquid to see if there was some usefull software and then I found this http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/349679. Someone that is selling blender for $60. And you can see in the right column that the source isn’t included (under the price by product specifications). I don’t know if this is illigal so that is why I posted this tread.
selling blender is 100% legit as long as you state that its an open source software and provide the source with the application.
this question was addressed plenty of times on this forum and the answer is the always the same
What Turbo Squid is doing is perfectly illegal and must be signaled though, protested against and stopped. They renamed Blender, make no mention of it and don’t offer the sources. Innaceptable IMO.
Jean
There’s a discussion Ton posted here:
about this and he did mention that the person was well within their rights under the GNU/GPL licenses Blender is released under. He goes on to detail what they are not entitled to do also. Altering the license and/or not including it is a no-no as are several other things. He also mentioned that it is more beneficial to Blender Foundation and to the selling party not to engage in this type of deceitful practice. Selling products (books, videos, etc…) and services (modeling, animation, stills) is much more favorable or win-win because these gain wide audience via Blender communities such as this one.
Thanks RamgoBaby!
So this is not illegal. I still hate it as it certainly borders on fraudulent. If it was to be largely known that they hide the Blender nature of their product as well as they can it sure should cut short to their practice and, in the case of Turbo Squid which is generally respected, AFAIK, it could damage their reputation noticeably.
it isn’t illegal, but how can people just plain out go out and sell other peoples work… the licensing needs some rewriting in my opinion.
and yes, selling services such a tutorial classes and books is WAY more profitable as you are the one that owns the rights to those and license them the way you want them.
Vitally,
isn’t the GPL license in rewriting right now?
I haven’t followed that very much and I wonder if this will be addressed. It clearly is a loophole!
Anyway, we’re still having a lot of fun.
Jean
You can only go so far with the licenses B4 they become too restrictive and begin to negate their original purpose.
Yes, that is a big problem.
Last revision of the GPL was 1991 I think.
The rewrite aim, among other things, at clarifying what could link to a GPL program without needing to be GPL itself. That should make the restrictions lighter. Of course the main concern is the patent claims that are rising…
I don’t anticipate that much of all this will touch Blender a lot
well, regardless of whether or not this clown has a right to sell blender, popular sites like turbosquid should have enough ethics to simply shut this kind of practice down. Has anyone tried emailing them to find out what their stance is?
I just did post into their forums, discretely since it was in the site maintenance and suggestions forum, but I wasn’t too kind I guess.
Jean
A couple clarifications…
You can sell GPL licensed software. You can rename GPL licensed software. These are not loopholes… these are fundamental tenets of the GPL. You do not need to provide source with the software you are distributing, but you do need to make the source available, or at least accompany the software with a written offer to provide the source code, which you may charge a nominal fee for delivering.
Free software is free as in speech, not necessarily free as in beer, and there’s really a whole lot of freedom packed into that one little license.
You may think this is crappy (and don’t get me wrong, in cases like this, I think it’s pretty crappy), but there is absolutely nothing illegal about any of it. That’s just how the GPL works, and these features aren’t going to change any time soon. It’s because of these provisions of the license that you can walk into a store today and buy a copy of SUSE or Xandros.
For anyone interested in the subject, your copy of Blender includes the full text of the GPL, which is surprisingly clearly written for a legal document. You can also find the full text of it at the GNU website – http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt