Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Blender Is Free Software

code.blender.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 335 posts

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#161

Post by ralph84 »

Koshkin wrote: post #136

Information comes in different forms, and I am not quite sure why software is considered speech (and must, therefore, be free), but, say, schematics of an industrial electronic device or the blueprint of an airplane is not.

There are certainly some people who argue that any form of IP shouldn’t exist. Copyleft is a way to work within the existing IP system, but they would prefer IP be abolished. As for why free software took off while free $(other engineering discipline) hasn’t, I’d say it’s because “everyone” has a computer, but very few have an airplane factory.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#162

Post by jsty »

craigsmansion wrote: post #65

It's nice a high profile project such as Blender speaks about freedom to push back against the "source available" movement. I've always wondered why niche specific software such as Blender doesn't have a ton of industry backing. Any medium sized graphics shop could have a full developer on the payroll for a fraction of the repeated licensing costs of proprietary solutions, that is, someone who works full time on Blen…

"Any medium sized graphics shop could have a full developer on the payroll for a fraction of the repeated licensing costs of proprietary solutions"

If the returns to the particular company that employed the developer was higher than the opportunity cost of expending that money elsewhere in the company, then you'd have a strong case for that. However, most medium sized graphics shops are probably concerned that they'd effectively be subsidising their competitors' production costs, since the 'exclusive' returns to the shop employing the developer are likely minimal compared to any other user of the feature they develop.

The free rider problem / tragedy of the commons strikes again.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#164

Post by weinzierl »

craigsmansion wrote: post #65

It's nice a high profile project such as Blender speaks about freedom to push back against the "source available" movement. I've always wondered why niche specific software such as Blender doesn't have a ton of industry backing. Any medium sized graphics shop could have a full developer on the payroll for a fraction of the repeated licensing costs of proprietary solutions, that is, someone who works full time on Blen…

> I think it has something to do with appealing to an employee's vanity, where getting a very expensive software package "for free" to do your job makes one feel appreciated.

It learned 3D modelling with one of those "very expensive software packages" and it made me feel appreciated at the time. The knowledge however is now completely useless for me because the software, while still existing, is totally niche now. Blender would have been a lifetime investment...

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#165

Post by iamcreasy »

_bxg1 wrote: post #151
mungoid wrote: post #124

I see a ton of people talk about how difficult blender is/was to use, but what I found funny is some of those same people use VIM.. Blender took me almost the exact same amount of time to learn as 3ds, but honestly once I got used to blender, I actually find 3ds harder and more confusing to use and actually changed a bunch of keybindings to more closely match blender.

Yep. Blender is impossible to use without instruction, but once you learn it it's perfectly usable.

I think they started improving the UI with version 2.5, and now with the 2.8 release the UI is very user friendly. I still find the undo stack confusing sometimes.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#166

Post by lttlrck »

dmos62 wrote: post #48
neilv wrote: post #18

I try to say libre software rather than Free Software , and I wish the FSF would back the libre term fully. When RMS is giving a speech, he has an opportunity to expound on what's now wordplay about "free software", to a captive audience that's perhaps already receptive or prepared to listen. But low-level grassroots advocacy opportunities often happen in contexts in which people are talking for some other purpose, a…

Isn't it fascinating that the English language doesn't have a distinction between the social meaning of free and the economic, in that these meanings are meshed into the same word?

Is it not free and gratis?

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#167

Post by lozenge »

craigsmansion wrote: post #65

It's nice a high profile project such as Blender speaks about freedom to push back against the "source available" movement. I've always wondered why niche specific software such as Blender doesn't have a ton of industry backing. Any medium sized graphics shop could have a full developer on the payroll for a fraction of the repeated licensing costs of proprietary solutions, that is, someone who works full time on Blen…

Maybe they don't have time to wait for features to be developed? Only the biggest projects have people saying "we'll need new fur/hair/dragon breath/water effects" early on and have a long or flexible timeline. Whereas your average project just need to work with what they already have. Even GoT which had a huge budget must have tight delivery deadlines that will make a project manager think twice before putting software development on their critical path.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#168

Post by pvaldes »

rocky1138 wrote: post #154
pvaldes wrote: post #137

Obviously, as it was since 20 years ago. This question was being answered and clear a lot of time ago. After buying books about blender, spending many hours and trying to learn it, I personally find that is still a big pain to use it, but this is a different question (and we can't blame propietary software for it; can we?). The real problem with blender is not if is free software or not, IMHO. Maybe Blender is the ne…

What you're suggesting is what happened to MySQL. Oracle bought it and the community forked the last pre-Oracle version to a new project, MariaDB, where everyone continues on as before.

This is the normal way when a program was widely accepted and has a lot of legacy code around that needs to be maintained. This is not the case with blender. I remember when skype, or the germ of whatssap, were born, nurtured and developped in Linux. We don't have any good alternative to skype nowadays. Nobody remembers skype as open source.

Blender interface was ridiculously hard to grasp for a newbie and as result, it looks still like a minoritary arcane software. I'm not in the community and could be wrong, but seen from outside it seems that blender is still struggling to be widely known or adopted. Twelve years had passed after "Big Buck Bunny" and blender seems to have problems still to attract new users (or it moves in a very closed circle).

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#169

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jsty wrote: post #162
craigsmansion wrote: post #65

It's nice a high profile project such as Blender speaks about freedom to push back against the "source available" movement. I've always wondered why niche specific software such as Blender doesn't have a ton of industry backing. Any medium sized graphics shop could have a full developer on the payroll for a fraction of the repeated licensing costs of proprietary solutions, that is, someone who works full time on Blen…

"Any medium sized graphics shop could have a full developer on the payroll for a fraction of the repeated licensing costs of proprietary solutions" If the returns to the particular company that employed the developer was higher than the opportunity cost of expending that money elsewhere in the company, then you'd have a strong case for that. However, most medium sized graphics shops are probably concerned that they'd…

> However, most medium sized graphics shops are probably concerned that they'd effectively be subsidising their competitors' production costs, since the 'exclusive' returns to the shop employing the developer are likely minimal compared to any other user of the feature they develop.

What causes most usage of big proprietary software is that the software has 10,000 features and every customer only needs five of them, but for each customer it's a different five. That makes it hard for a free competitor to get users because adding five features only gets one customer; it scales poorly without revenue.

But as the customer yourself, having your developer add the five things you yourself need is completely feasible, and doesn't help your competitors that much because the five things they need are different.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#170

Post by jeremyjh »

jsty wrote: post #162
craigsmansion wrote: post #65

It's nice a high profile project such as Blender speaks about freedom to push back against the "source available" movement. I've always wondered why niche specific software such as Blender doesn't have a ton of industry backing. Any medium sized graphics shop could have a full developer on the payroll for a fraction of the repeated licensing costs of proprietary solutions, that is, someone who works full time on Blen…

"Any medium sized graphics shop could have a full developer on the payroll for a fraction of the repeated licensing costs of proprietary solutions" If the returns to the particular company that employed the developer was higher than the opportunity cost of expending that money elsewhere in the company, then you'd have a strong case for that. However, most medium sized graphics shops are probably concerned that they'd…

You could make the same argument about commercial software. The money you pay the developer will go into building features and better quality software that helps your competition as much or more as it helps you. Yes they are also paying, what difference does that make? I don't see why you'd waste time worrying about this in either case.
Post reply on HN