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

[Damir Prebeg]

>
> I don't think *anyone* is suggesting that the Blender code "end up in
> some closed source software". We're looking at making Blender capable
> (legally) of using third-party distributed closed-source plugins. This
> is about *extending* Blender, not taking parts of it and making them
> proprietary.
>

No, it's not a debate about how to legally use third-party closed source
plug-ins in Blender. If you go back you'll see that the main premise of this
debate was "Big Silicon Valley companies are not using GPL software (eg.
Blender) because of fear that their own proprietary software would get
"polluted" with GPL so they would have to publish their code". And the
beginning conclusion was that if they could use Blender source without that
fear they would have more willingness to contribute to Blender source code.
I'm sorry but I don't believe in that. Have you seen any big commercial
company that has started to create commercial plug-ins for GIMP or to
contribute to GIMP source? And I must say that term "polluting" is quite
significant because it really shows how those companies are looking on free
software.

Regarding making plug-ins for blender, in GPL FAQ is stated this:
*Can I write free software that uses non-free libraries?* If you do this,
your program won't be fully usable in a free environment. If your program
depends on a non-free library to do a certain job, it cannot do that job in
the Free World. If it depends on a non-free library to run at all, it cannot
be part of a free operating system such as GNU; it is entirely off limits to
the Free World.I'm not an C or C++ programmer but as I understand this, If
someone creates commercial plug-in for blender (eg. raytracer) in DLL form,
Blender can call that dll on Windows system. Only thing that creator of that
dll would have to disclose are dll calls, am I right?
And since Blender doesn't really need that dll to work, it can be used on
Linux or any other system as well.