[Bf-committers] Can BGE be relicensed?

[Sinan Hassani]

That makes no sense, the GPL is a copyright document. It works based on 
copyright laws.

There is no "releasing something as GPL", you have to relicense code to 
GPL. To relicense code you need to secure the consent of all copyright 
holders.

Saying that people paid to have Blender relicensed to GPL but without 
the transfer of copyright of the code, is like saying someone sold you a 
can of soda without the soda. In other words, the "purchase of 
copyright" is part of the deal. So the original people that payed to 
have Blender relicensed now have or own code that is licensed under the 
GPL and they have copyright over that code.

Now, I remember that Blender was relicensed with an option to "offer 
licenses outside of the GNU GPL":

http://www.blender.org/BL/

but the BF never makes use of the option. If that was the case, the BF 
foundation can choose to make Blender available under a different license.

So one idea is to have the BF give people the ability to purchase a 
license for BGE(Blender) for say $99 US where they can license it under 
the MIT license. This would generate revenue for the BF, they can have 
extra money to pay GE developers, and it will attract more developers. 
This is how the Torque3D model now works, the engine is open source, 
they make money on services.


Sinan

On 12-12-02 02:04 PM, Dan Eicher wrote:
> I'm guessing The Community didn't purchase the cppyright to the code
> but merely paid to have it released as GPLv2 then?
>
> If that's the case then all these talks on re-licensing are mostly
> (totally) pointless...
>
> Dan