[Bf-committers] Licensing question for ported code

[Joel Sjögren]

Hello developers, I have a licensing question. I have been freelancing for
a couple of days at a company that has been using Blender's Perlin noise
shader and needed to get identical results using Unreal Engine and HLSL
instead.

Now we are considering making a plugin for UE with various ported Blender
shaders. Of course, given that Blender is GPL (except for files here and
there that even have BSD 3-clause or that are partially copies of code that
is in the public domain) it would be fine to publish such a UE plugin under
the GPL license.

But would it then be permissible for someone else to use such a plugin as a
dependency in proprietary code? Having read up on this a little on Google
and FSF's website, the copyleft aspect of GPL (as opposed to LGPL) is much
more pronounced than I had realized. I also checked the licensing page on
your Blender website and I gather that it would be permissible to use such
a plugin to create proprietary models and artwork. But if proprietary
*software* that has the plugin as a dependency is *redistributed*... would
this be in any way permitted?

Best wishes,
Joel

P.S. It's been a long while since I last tried using a mailing list so I
hope you get this message in the correct way. I also hope that I found the
most appropriate sublist to send it to. Cheers