[Bf-committers] A practical proposal for the task of re-licensing Blender

[Christopher Allan Webber]

There's been a lot of discussion on here about "how could we move to a
point where we weaken the copyleft Blender has?"

I would just like to put in that not everyone hopes this will
happen... I do not hope it will happen.  I personally think the lack of
a copyright assignment within Blender, and using the GPL, is actually
tremendously to Blender's advantage: it keeps the copyleft strong, even
when people don't want it to be.. example, now.

This is a feature!

I know that people have the best intentions here, hoping to increase the
diversity of Blender usage, but I think that if Blender is good, people
will use it.  If companies want to make their own custom tools in-house,
they can already do that.  But I personally don't see value in a future
with proprietary extensions on top of Blender.

I don't have anything more to contribute to the conversation here (well
besides the temptation to correct some clear misinformation on the
thread, of which there's been a lot, but I'm staying out of that also).
I'm only writing this email to comment on the fact that there's been a
ton of noise on-list related to changing the license, despite the
tremendous difficulty that would be involved in doing so.  Well, not
everyone wants that to happen.  I don't.

Keep Blender maximally free!
 - Christopher Allan Webber