[Bf-committers] supporting 6Dof devices on blender.

[Ettore Pasquini]

On 5/20/07 6:49 AM, "Ton Roosendaal" <ton at blender.org> wrote:
> 
> The "About" can also open a browser with a link to the Blender website,
> with all the proper licensing issues and credits for contributors.
> Doing that, will also give our users the confirmation such crediting is
> correct and not advertisement or misleading.

Makes sense, that's perfectly fine for us. We can change the license again
to match this.

> I really don't like the idea of bundling blender with additional
> crediting requirements. The splash is also no advertisement place and
> not for sale.

Yep. No problem :-)

> Blender distributions can only be done with GPL compliant content. In
> that respect 3Dconnexion can make their API or code available for us.
> It then gets distributed on equal terms as for openal, opengl, superlu,
> and so on.

Yep, all my code will be GPL'ed. However, the 3Dconnexion API implementation
is part of the driver and it can't be GPL'ed.

> Alternative is to not have any 3Dconnexion code in our distros, but
> allow a running Blender to open external libraries (dlopen). That means
> dynamic linking, and no dependencies.

Our thinking was to have an external (GPL'ed) plugin that contains all the
3Dx API calls, and then dlopen this inside blender.  We would really like to
distribute this plugin with blender for a better user experience, but I am
not sure if the GPL allows it?
I guess it would not be absolutely necessary: a sub-optimal alternative
could be that we take care of distributing and  installing the plugin.
 
> Lastly; I would recommend 3Dconnexion to fully open up their driver
> code or API. That will make it a much easier decision, and opens up
> Linux as market as well.

That's true, but I am afraid that convincing my company to open the entire
driver (on all platforms) will be extremely hard. In any case, all the
blender related code will be open, plugin included.

--Ettore


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