[Bf-funboard] Blender licensing...

[Tony Mullen]

Hi,

I assume you know this, but just to clarify

> If I would like to extend application to support new features without giving them right away to competitors. (and loose competitivness of company)

You can extend Blender and support new features all you want, and you
never have to give them to anybody. You simply keep them in-house
(i.e., not publicly available or distributed) and you never have to
worry about GPL'ing your new code. You might be well advised to share,
though, just to make it easier to keep your branch compatible with the
rest of Blender development. You don't have to though, if you don't
distribute binaries.

What you can't do, of course, is to add some functionality to Blender,
close the source, and go into business selling binaries of a
proprietary branch of Blender. This is simply not how Blender is
intended to be used, period.

Anyway, your proprietary additions would have to be pretty impressive
for you to be able to compete with a closed-source, paid application
that would compete head-to-head with the already well-established,
rapidly developing, free Blender. Personally, I think such a business
plan would be totally doomed to fail.

It's different for libraries like Bullet, which are intended to be
used within other software. But for a full application like Blender,
there's really not much point in having a permissive license, IMO.

T