[Bf-committers] A practical proposal for the task of re-licensing Blender

[Alex Combas]

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 11:33 PM, Campbell Barton <ideasman42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Look at the simplest case for a LGPL switch:
>  if all blender developers and all contributors agree to switch to LGPL.
>
> We still have libraries that are GPL, these cant just be made into
> extensions, they need to be replaced or removed/rewritten.
>
> The likely-hood of convincing external projects from GPL to LGPL is much lower.
>
> Quick grep reveals...
> - intern/elbeem: Fluids, can be disabled now at build time.
> - extern/lzo: Compression lib, can be disabled now at build time.
> - extern/Eigen2: Math lib, can be disabled now at build time.


Eigen2 is actually LGPL already so it is no problem.
http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Main_Page#License

> - intern/moto: Math lib, used for the BGE and IK's, could of course be
> replaced but not trivial.

I thought that moto was already planned to be completely replaced
(eventually) by Eigen2?
http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2010-February/026014.html
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Moguri/BGE_Eigen2

So that leaves elbeem and lzo.

Is there any possibility that these two could be refactored as extensions?
I'm not asking you to do it, I'm just asking if you think that it
might be possible.
I realize some things might be so deeply embedded that refactoring
them would not be an option.

I suppose that another option is offering blender under multiple licenses.

For example: an LGPL version of Blender without elbeem and lzo, and a
GPL version with them.