On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 12:34 PM, Damir Prebeg <[email protected]>wrote:
> I don't see any benefits for Blender if it would be "easier" for Silicon > Valey guys to link their proprietary code with Blenders code. Sorry, but I think this is quite short sighted. The current situation with blender is that developers are being told how they must license their code, and they have very little freedom in this regard since it is really just two options: a) make your code open source b) keep your code top secret forever That does not sound very exciting or encouraging to me. If people could easily build closed source extensions to blender, it would not benefit blender itself, but it WOULD benefit the blender community. For example: some people use blender for work, and they want high quality extensions and we are willing to pay for them. This also has the added benefit that if blenders' developer community becomes more active then people will also become more interested in the development of blender itself. If a company makes money from selling a closed extension to blender, they would likely become more interested in contributing open source code to blender itself, since the better blender becomes the more opportunity they have to sell their close source extension. Thus a more vibrant community benefits everyone. This is exactly what has happened with Linux in the hardware market. Hardware vendors want Linux users to buy their hardware, so they start to work on closed source drivers so that their hardware can work on Linux. After a while the hardware vendors see that they are making money from Linux customers, and so they become more interested in Linux itself and begin to work to improve Linux itself. IBM, HP, and many other major companies are now regularly submitting code to Linux itself to help improve it, because the better that Linux becomes they more hardware they might sell. It would be exactly the same with closed source extensions for blender. If companies start to make money from blender they will eventually become more interested in improving blender itself. > "IF IDENTIFIABLE SECTIONS of that work ARE NOT DERIVED FROM THE PROGRAM, > and > can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, > THEN THIS LICENSE, and its terms, DO NOT APPLY TO THOSE SECTIONS WHEN YOU > DISTRIBUTE THEM AS SEPARATE WORKS." > > I'm not a GPL expert or a lawyer, but I think that the important sentence is "and can be reasonably considered INDEPENDANT and SEPARATE works". Currently, if you write an extension/addon that uses any part of blender, or relies upon any part of blender, even just the python interface which is included with blender, then it can not reasonably be considered independant and separate, and thus it is subject to the terms of the GPL. I do not think there is any reasonable way around this. best regards, Alex "blenderwell" Combas > _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
