[Bf-committers] extension clause

David Jeske davidj at gmail.com
Sun Nov 21 17:09:53 CET 2010


On Sat, Nov 20, 2010 at 5:50 AM, Campbell Barton <ideasman42 at gmail.com>wrote:

> And regarding this making companies paranoid - this is conjecture, But
> if some group choose to be ignorant & paranoid then this is their own
> foolishness.
>

That depends on who needs who. The companies don't need Blender. There are
plenty of alternatives out there (which today are much better anyhow). The
commercial cost of these alternatives is irrelevant compared to labor costs
(at least in the west).  When I recently talked to one of my game-studio
contacts about this discussion and why they don't touch GPL stuff with a ten
foot pole, he also reminded me some of the other reasons Blender wouldn't be
good enough today even if the license was fixed.

On the flip side, Blender would be much better with these professional
users. Users that could embrace, improve, and contribute to blender. In the
words of the FSF:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

This is why we used the Lesser GPL for the GNU C library. After all, there
> are plenty of other C libraries; using the GPL for ours would have driven
> proprietary software developers to use another—*no problem for them, only
> for us*.


libc, Linux, MySQL, Python, gcc, and many other pieces of popular free
software reached their current state because of a virtuous cycle of being
good for users, allowing users to make them better. The ones that are able
to do it with the GPL (linux-kernel, gcc, mysql), can do it because they
don't need users to link directly into their stuff to get work done. The
ones that do need direct linking (python, libc) have done so by not using
the GPL.

It doesn't do Blender any good to call commercial companies "wrong" for
being concerned about the GPL and avoiding it. Blender will still be out the
users. Maya and 3dsmax will still be the most popular animation tools. I'm
beginning to feel like a minority in wanting Blender to one day become a
real disruptive open-source alternative to these commercial tools.


More information about the Bf-committers mailing list