[Bf-funboard] Some great feedback

[David Jeske]

I think both #1 and #2 hinge on something that I think has a ton of
opportunity for improvement - better and less restrictive license terms for
shared 3d modeling source files.

The free software movement has been wildly successful by allowing people so
share code while fairly retaining contributor credit. (a) attribution is
retained (and viewable) inside program source code. (b) When copyright is
required in the work-product (such as BSD licenses) it is practical to do
so. Because Software is very open-ended and has "about dialogs" and such
which allow for credit to be shown.

Neither of these options is currently practical for 3D content.

(a) Currently there is no standard to make copyright/attribution part of
the blender files in a robust and visible way. This is an opportunity, as
it could dramatically ease the sharing of free-3d-modeling source content
if license and attribution living inside blender files gave authors the
contribution credit they deserve.

(b) there is no reasonable way to feature attribution in one of the most
common work-products - still images. Therefore, any 3d source files which
are under BSD or CC-BY like licenses are effectively unusable or unsharable
for many projects.

I think blender (and sites like blend swap) could improve sharing and
reuse, especially among beginners and students, by doing the following:

(a) Start adding and displaying attribution and copyright information
inside blender files, and display such information on startup. We could do
this ad-hoc today with a "license.txt" text-block. Blender could support
this by displaying license.txt information in some relevant places.
(file-open, on load of a full blend file) This could be with a specific
"license" feature, or even just a "display notes" feature, where some text
block is designated the important text notes of the file.

(b) We to encourage the use of completely unrestrictive licenses, like
CC-ZERO, and we need to make a new BSD-inspired license which requires
carrying copyright in the source files, and encourages its display where
possible (aka video credits), but which does NOT require it in other cases,
such as still images.