[Bf-committers] extension clause

[Christopher Allan Webber]

As Aurel said, GPL's clauses work on distribution, so as long as your
extensions are in-house, there is no requirement that you distribute
your source.

But also, aside from allowing the publishing of proprietary extensions
being a bad idea, as it was discussed last month, it's probably
impossible.  Adding an "extension clause" would require relicensing, and
to my knowledge the Blender Foundation does no copyright assignment, so
it would require every single contributor to Blender ever to agree to
relicense their code, something that is almost certainly not going to
happen.

"Aurel W." <aurel.w at gmail.com> writes:

> In my opinion we can do very well without any proprietary extensions.
> GPL doesn't require you to release any "private" code, so if you want
> to integrate blender into your own studio pipeline with proprietary
> libs, you don't run into problems.
>
> And no, I don't think blender will profit in any way, when someone
> starts to market proprietary and closed source extensions for it.
>
> Aurel
>
> On 13 November 2010 08:35, David Jeske <davidj at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I understand I'm following up on a discussion from last month. I think it's
>> an important one. There were many good points raised about the license
>> requirements for extensions. I hope these additional thoughts are a well
>> received.
>>
>> I think it will benefit the Blender community if commercial companies can
>> use Blender as a replacement for commercial tools. In order to do this, it's
>> often necessary for them to link propritary code in as extension modules,
>> and make use of them deeply in their rendering and/or asset management
>> process. This discussion brought up the point that it's "probably fine" to
>> write propritary extension modules, especially if it's done in the privacy
>> of a company. However, please understand the conservative environment of
>> corporations. All corporate council I'm aware of will advise against
>> linking proprietary code to GPL code as a potential GPL violation. This will
>> make it an un-viable corporate risk. Or put differently, the legal safety of
>> commercial alternatives is simply worth too much. Which means they will use
>> commercial tools instead of blender. Which is a lost opportunity for the
>> adoption of excellent users that would help advance blender.  "truly free"
>> open source tools like Python are more accepted in corporate environments
>> for this specific reason.
>>
>> I think it will benefit Blender's adoption substantially if the Blender code
>> licensing is structured in a way to make it very safe and indisputable that
>> it's okay to build closed-source extensions with proprietary code.   I
>> understand it may be important to draw this line carefully. In my opinion it
>> will be worth the effort.
>>
>> I don't know the blender community or blender foundation position on
>> for-sale binary extension modules for Blender, and I understand this may be
>> a tricky issue. However, regardless of the stance on this, I think it will
>> be of great benefit if companies feel safe in linking their own code with
>> blender inside their own environment. In my experience, this is not
>> generally accepted as a valid thing to do with GPL code and the current
>> interpretations of the GPL.
>>
>> I understand this also may not be the biggest priority at the moment, but I
>> think it's an important issue that deserves some serious consideration.
>>
>> Thanks again to all of you for helping to make Blender such a great
>> success!
>> _______________________________________________
>> Bf-committers mailing list
>> Bf-committers at blender.org
>> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
>>
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-committers mailing list
> Bf-committers at blender.org
> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers