But I have the feeling you think open-source automatically means 'free'.
Your business is not selling software (I hope), your business is selling
licenses.
Using a dual-licenses approach, it would be free to use for
non-commercial open-sourced projects, but studios would still have to
pay licenses for proprietary development. So no change here in terms of
business, this could even be transparent for your existing customers.
Nothing would change for them and you would get the same amount of money
from them.
Yet, instead allowing them to distribute free Fabric tools if they
choose to, this could perhaps allow them to sell Fabric tools too.
Better business model for everyone.
While being open-sourced and free for non commercial developments, trust
is back and open-sourced communities developments could start.
ps: a contract means nothing if a company disappear, I believe I'm not
the only one who has experienced that.
Cheers,
Guy.
--
guy rabiller | radfac founder | raa.tel
On 12/12/14 19:01, Paul Doyle wrote:
The fact is there are no successful open-source companies in our
industry because the numbers don't work. The companies that do
open-source in our industry are doing something else as their main
business. Our main business is selling software. Typically a software
company open-sources if they see an opportunity to build a services
business/premium support model around their software - the conversion
percentages here are typically <5% of the user base and often much
lower. Simply put - our industry is too technical ("we don't need no
stinking support") and too small (how many studios are there globally
above 10 employees?) for that to be viable, we would die.
As for trust - that was really my point in my last email. Fabric makes
guarantees through our licensing agreements with customers - they
don't have to trust what I tell them, they have a contract that gives
them what they need.
I get that many people feel burned and why that makes a very
compelling argument for OSS alternatives. If we felt that we could be
successful doing that, then we'd be doing it. There is no moral
opposition to the notion of open-sourcing, it's a matter of doing such
a thing if and when it makes sense. Right now that's not our position.
On 12 December 2014 at 12:33, Guy Rabiller <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Yeah well, with all the lies Autodesk gave us, how come can you
expect to be trusted ?
Nothing personal though, you are not responsible.
But the trust is lost, broken, irreversibly. They did a pretty
good job at it. Blame them.
The only projects and products that deserve trust are open sourced
projects. Period.
Yet I still don't understand why you are so afraid to open source
the core using a dual license. Take Berkeley DB from Oracle for
instance. Open sourced, dual licensed. I don't think Oracle stakes
holders are less business oriented than Autodesk ones. Wiser perhaps ?
Cheers,
Guy.
--
guy rabiller | radfac founder |raa.tel <http://raa.tel>
On 12/12/14 18:10, Paul Doyle wrote:
Our customers all have agreements that protect them, and next
year we'll be pushing on the 3rd party licensing model which will
also allow people to distribute free Fabric tools if they choose
to. If someone wanted to build a full-on DCC then we'd have a
license agreement that would protect them as well.
There are more approaches to this than just 'open source all the
things!'.
On 12 December 2014 at 11:27, Guy Rabiller
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Create a whole dcc on top of a proprietary closed source
product that can disappear or be trashed at any time ? Are
you kidding ? Will you ever learn ?
I guess loosing Softimage was not enough for you ? Or you
simply don't care ?
I still do. For a long time.
Cheers,
Guy.
--
guy rabiller | radfac founder |raa.tel <http://raa.tel>
On 12/12/14 14:39, Ahmidou Lyazidi wrote:
Il don't see the need to expose the core either, you can
already create a whole dcc by yourself. You can extend the
Splice standalone and add as many feature as you want. You
can add/derive/modify all the KL objects. You can draw
whatever you want in modern opengl and interact with the
objects in the viewport. Integrate. c++ libraries and
finally customize the ui with QT.
What would you like to do by changing the core?
Le 12 déc. 2014 06:00, "Thomas Mansencal"
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> a écrit :
Excellent! I'm not a rigger but my friends rigger are
now aware :)
On Fri Dec 12 2014 at 10:31:36 AM Sebastien Sterling
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hot shit this stuff looks cool, just make a DCC
already :P
Na i get why that can't be a priority right now,
still all this awsome...
We are hungry for more i'm sure :) so congrats to
all and to you Paul.
On 12 December 2014 at 08:23, Nicolas Esposito
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Great job guys!
I'm very interested especially regarding the
DeltaMush modifier, looks fantastic!
Very interesting is the Blendshapes rig...about
that I'm thinking that the debugging of the
blendshape could be used for realtime
deformation ( displacement or wrinkle maps )
that triggers automatically ( ala Facerobot but
much quicker ).
I'm still not familiar with Fabric Engine so
pardon my questions but:
- Regarding the captain atom rig, if I
understood correctly you are able via Alembic to
bake all the deformation you setup with the
Rigging Toolbox and then via script apply those
deformation on the source mesh itself, right?
so, after I did all the deformations I want I
can simply bake those deformations with a script
and then export the rig itself in FBX and those
deformations are baked in, right?
- Same question, but related to tge blendshape
rig...at 22.10 the locator is described as a
container which holds the geometry, but there's
no actual geometry in the scene...in this case
how the export in FBX would work?
Cheers guys, this looks awesome!
2014-12-12 3:46 GMT+01:00 Paul Doyle
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>:
Hi Guy - no, we're not planning to
open-source the core. Thanks for the
analysis of our client base and users ;)
Paul
On 11 December 2014 at 21:28, Guy Rabiller
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hi Paul,
Still no plan to make the Core open
sourced (perhaps dual licensed ala
Oracle) and available to open sourced
projects ?
I see you are now in need for more
users/clients, perhaps this could be the
right time ?
Cheers,
Guy.
--
guy rabiller | radfac founder |raa.tel
<http://raa.tel>
On 11/12/14 22:48, Paul Doyle wrote:
(X-Post from 3DPro)
Hi everyone - something that has come
up a few times with customers has been
'can you give us some sample deformers
written in KL for us to get started?'.
The Rigging Toolbox is our pass at
doing just that: a public repo where
people can see how we've approached
things like delta mush (is it too late
to be considered part of the DM hype
train?) and contribute back their own
work if they want to.
video here: https://vimeo.com/114272905
website + link to repo:
http://fabricengine.com/rigging-toolbox/
"The Rigging Toolbox provides a
collection of production relevant tools
that can be used when building
character pipelines using Fabric
Engine. These tools can be used as is,
or purely as reference as you build
your own implementations. Recently we
have added a suite of deformers and are
now working on leveraging our GPU
compute capabilities with these deformers."
The rigging toolbox works in Maya, Max
and Softimage with our Splice plugin,
so this all has the usual Fabric
benefits of encapsulation and
portability. As we move to visual
programming next year, this work will
all be compatible there as well.
Last infomercial piece:
http://fabricengine.com/get-fabric/ Fabric
is free for individuals and we're
giving 50 free licenses to studios,
which helps when you're hoping people
will contribute to a project like this.
Thanks,
Paul
