[Bf-committers] extension clause

[Dan Eicher]

>
> I believe it's important to many users (especially, but not limited to
> corporate users) to have a secondary 'proprietary plugin market', because
> they get benefit from being able to buy those plugins and use them to get
> work done, instead of waiting for a community to author them, or trying to
> sink lots of their own resources into developing them. The open source
> community would eventually do what it always tries to do, and copy the
> commercial plugins, which is totally fine. The commercial companies have to
> keep innovating to stay ahead of 'free and open source', and open-source
> gets better all the time. This virtuous cycle doesn't happen if they can't
> even start.
>
> That option has been discussed and all but approved, the only hitch is the
plugin writers also have to write and maintain the BSD (or whatever) api
shim code.

> Oh, and friend who says 'Blender wouldn't be good enough today even if the
> > license was fixed'.
> >
>
> We all know this to be true. Is there someone who thinks differently? I
> want
> to see a world where Blender is good enough to replace Maya.
>
> We all know people who will switch if 'blender had feature X' and people
who wouldn't switch under any circumstances but what relevance does this
have to the current discussion?

Unless, of course, you believe that the only way blender can improve enough
is to allow proprietary extensions.

It's kind of funny how people/companies are willing to contribute code to
(and use) Linux more than all the BSD put together yet Linux has a more
restrictive license. You'd think they would all be scared away from the GPL
and go towards a license where they don't have to worry about having their
code 'virally' infected or 'lost' if they (accidently or otherwise)
distribute it. But they don't which IMHO says a lot.

<snip>

> For
> example, if I made an interesting game using the Blender Game Engine, I
> could sell my game as a binary with my only obligation to release the
> source
> to all components of the Blender Game Engine I used, as well as any
> improvements or changes I made to that code. My game-code could remain
> closed and sold as a for-profit binary.
>
> You can do that now, your python code can be licensed how you please and
art assets are protected by standard copyright law.

AFAICT there is no C (or otherwise) extension api for the GE so it doesn't
matter either way.

Dan