The definition of the word Open will just morph again until it fits whatever argument needs to be win. The opinion that Open necessarily means open source is a neologism.
There isn't just an API that matches 1:1 internals, the Maya UI is defined directly in MEL and it ships with 4 millions lines of source code in mel and python, distributed in 25,000 MEL and 4000 pythons files. This isn't just about being able to write plug-ins, back in 1990s it was a whole different approach to writing software. On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 7:13 PM, Raffaele Fragapane <[email protected]> wrote: > Talk about semantics escalating :) > > The word open is like saying professional grade, or robust, or a number of > other things that are used because, in context, they fit. > > Maya offered more and sooner than everybody else things like listeners, a > robust socket insertion point, an entry point into the main loop and control > over things like it's main event loop sleep, process priority, exposed the > graph to a fairly granular level, and offered early on what 16 years ago was > a fairly modern dev model for all kind of nodes in a fashion similar to what > the developers themselves would have access to. > > That gap has closed considerably, and in some cases Maya has been surpassed > in "open-ness", or at least in what you can comfortably do (viewport work in > Maya is a gigantic pain in the arse in example for certain things, and > contexts are weak, but that's architectural, not blackboxing), but all in > all, if you decide to be objective rather than argumentative about it, it is > the one DCC app out there with the most of its guts exposed to the open air. > > Softimage had made it to a close second and here and there even surpassed > it, and in general while less "open", as things tend to be better organized > but abstracted away from the guts, also a helluva lot more pleasurable to > work with (at least on windows). Houdini is a well known disgrace with the > Boost dependencies and with the HDK being largely uncharted and unexploited, > and the wrappers for it being more recent and not much better than a > reshuffle. > Max is single platform and incomprehensible to humans, and the rest of the > apps out there barely cover half the stretch of tasks Maya, Soft and Houdini > can tackle. > > All in all, while at (frequent) times being just as pleasant as dipping your > balls in hot tar, Maya is the more "open" of the lot and has been for a > while, because the abstractions are very thin, and access has massive > surface with a lot of entry points. > > For what most people think of when the word open it's used in context it can > lay an honest claim to being "very open". > It can't quite say it's intuitive, or pleasant, or well organized, or even > fully featured in some regards, and it's the single most painful software > out there to do prototyping work in for a lot of stuff, but it certainly > isn't "closed".
