[Bf-committers] extension clause

[Alex Combas]

On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 12:34 PM, Damir Prebeg <blend.factory at gmail.com>wrote:

> I don't see any benefits for Blender if it would be "easier" for Silicon
> Valey guys to link their proprietary code with Blenders code.


Sorry, but I think this is quite short sighted.

The current situation with blender is that developers are being told how
they must license their
code, and they have very little freedom in this regard since it is really
just two options:

a) make your code open source
b) keep your code top secret forever

That does not sound very exciting or encouraging to me.

If people could easily build closed source extensions to blender, it would
not benefit blender
itself, but it WOULD benefit the blender community.

For example: some people use blender for work, and they want high
quality extensions and we are willing
to pay for them. This also has the added benefit that if blenders' developer
community becomes more active
then people will also become more interested in the development of blender
itself.

If a company makes money from selling a closed extension to blender, they
would likely become more
interested in contributing open source code to blender itself, since the
better blender becomes
the more opportunity they have to sell their close source extension.

Thus a more vibrant community benefits everyone.

This is exactly what has happened with Linux in the hardware market.
Hardware vendors want Linux users
to buy their hardware, so they start to work on closed source drivers so
that their hardware can work on Linux.
After a while the hardware vendors see that they are making money from Linux
customers, and so they become
more interested in Linux itself and begin to work to improve Linux itself.
IBM, HP, and many other major companies
are now regularly submitting code to Linux itself to help improve it,
because the better that Linux becomes
they more hardware they might sell.

It would be exactly the same with closed source extensions for blender. If
companies start to make money
from blender they will eventually become more interested in improving
blender itself.



> "IF IDENTIFIABLE SECTIONS of that work ARE NOT DERIVED FROM THE PROGRAM,
> and
> can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves,
> THEN THIS LICENSE, and its terms, DO NOT APPLY TO THOSE SECTIONS WHEN YOU
> DISTRIBUTE THEM AS SEPARATE WORKS."
>
>
I'm not a GPL expert or a lawyer, but I think that the important sentence is
"and
can be reasonably considered INDEPENDANT and SEPARATE works".

Currently, if you write an extension/addon that uses any part of blender, or
relies upon any part of blender,
even just the python interface which is included with blender, then it can
not reasonably be considered independant and separate,
and thus it is subject to the terms of the GPL.

I do not think there is any reasonable way around this.

best regards,
Alex "blenderwell" Combas



>