[Bf-committers] extension clause

[Alex Combas]

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 6:54 AM, Ton Roosendaal <ton at blender.org> wrote:

>
> ...
>
> To Alex Combas (and others): the fact Blender uses one of the
> strictest OS licenses has benefited us too. Contributors can keep
> their own copyrights, and market or spread their own contributions
> totally free. In that sense anyone contributing to Blender is well
> protected to define their own rights. If we would switch to BSD, any
> cool contribution then could show up in commercial apps immediately.
>
>
I agree and that is why I would not suggest switching to BSD.

My suggestion would be to license Blender as "GPL with exception for
extensions".

All this means is that the GPL would not automatically apply to extensions
and so
extensions would have to be explicitly licensed with whatever license the
author choses.

This way commercial companies would be free to make closed source extensions
and
charge for them, and open source developers would still be free to make open
source
GPL extensions.

Right now, all extensions are automatically forced to be licensed as GPL.

But just to be clear, I am not talking about the code for Blender itself,
Blender itself
should always remain GPL, it is only in the matter of extensions that I
think authors
should be given more freedom to license extensions how they decide is best.

When Blender was given freedom, I do not think people wanted to take away
the freedom
of people who in the future would write extensions for blender, but nobody
thought about
that at the time.

Right now Blender is closed off from a potentially lucrative market because
of its licensing.

Licensing blender as "GPL with exception for extensions" is what is needed
to open up that market.