My large previous post was focused around the reasoning behind my position. I didn't want my suggestions for how to improve the situation to be lost in it. Here are a few concrete suggestions. Note that in making these suggestions, I'm not attempting to judge what would be required to make these changes, simply suggesting alternatives that I believe would be better than the current state:
(1) switch Blender entirely to the LGPL The LGPL license is used for libc, and is written to require source modifications to the code to remain free and available like the GPL. However, it allows for "combined works" that link directly into the address space of the LGPL code, without requiring that code be under any particular license. This would allow closed-source extensions, as well as allowing blender to be compiled into closed-source combined works. All improvements to the blender code would need to be released, but the closed-source pieces built around or inside blender could remain closed. This would allow, for example: (a) games written using the blender game engine to be distributed without releasing the entire source. Any improvements or modifications to blender or the blender game engine itself would need to be distributed. (b) extension modules which were build specifically for blender to be distributed as closed source. (2) create a section of LGPL code to handle the extension API This is a compromise intended to acheive the same as (1) without changing the license of existing code. There are some issues however. Doing this may violate the GPL, as it is linked with the main blender code and thus should be under the GPL, not the LGPL. Further, it's hard to imagine how an extension API could insulate an extension from the details of blender without encompasing most of RNA and anything related to touching data-model. (3) create a special provision for extensions, either as a carve-out addition to the GPL, or an alternate "Blender-GPL" modified form of the GPL. While I believe the LGPL was designed for and handles this case very well, it may be easier for the community to agree on approving a small license addition carveout for extensions while keeping the GPL in place as-is. ... again, I'm not attempting to start a debate on the viability of making one of these changes. I'm attempting to discuss and build concensus about the benefits of doing so. Because Blender Foundation did not establish a process for copyright assignment, a change like this would involve auditing copyrightholders and either obtaining their permission, removing their code, or resigning the change as unviable. Any discussion about whether or not this is feasible is simply speculation. _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
