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Blender Is Free Software

code.blender.org

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Re: Blender Is Free Software

#251

Post by craigsmansion »

micmil wrote: post #190
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…

It has nothing to do with "employee vanity" and that's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. There's a simple reason Blender doesn't see much use in film production: Support. There is no way the Blender Foundation could provide the level of support that a company like Autodesk does. When you run into problems you call your enterprise support team and get it fixed. This is why you pay them the big bucks. Their…

> The idea that a company should just hire a programmer they don't otherwise need just so they can make some software work is asinine

Weren't you just saying the magic ingredient was "support"? Do you believe a first line help-desk is going to provide better support than a guy whose livelihood depends on it and you can call to your desk?

>That's like saying a home builder should hire a full time auto mechanic

In this specific case, it's more like fairly large transporters having their own mechanics, which they have, because it's cheaper, and better, and faster, and generally very convenient all round.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#252

Post by em-bee »

dghughes wrote: post #174

Blender is a great application some day I will put more time into learning it. I have always loved drawing, photography and video. Even as a kid in the 80s when two of those were very expensive. I was into it so much that as a child and teen I was labelled as "that kid that likes to draw". Later in life I was moments away from apply to an art college (NSCAD) but backed out. Also as a kid I liked programming but I nev…

in an attempt to learn more about blender i just hosted a self-learning workshop a week ago. about 20 people showed up and together we explored what blender could do and how to work with it. no-one was an expert, and we didn't have anyone give a presentation. although one participant was a design teacher who had started to learn blender with his students. unpromted he stood up and shared what he had already learned about all the keyboard shortcuts. we had a great time and everyone learned something.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#253

Post by gridspy »

micmil wrote: post #196
kgwxd wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone wants fixed, known deliverables, the last thing they should be looking at is proprietary software, where a seemingly stable product suddenly updates and everything is different and the license changes retroactively, e.g Photoshop. Version controlled, open source means you can check out any version you might need, at any time, now and forever. Seems worth throwing some money at such a promise.

Spoken like someone that doesn't own a business. You do not throw money at promises. You throw money at solutions.

Possibly a better phrasing would be "An open source ecosystem is worth investing in to hedge against the risk of license and source changes by the vendor"

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#254

Post by beatgammit »

amenod wrote: post #240
simias wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what I was saying, I was pointing out weird or bombastic expressions that entered our collective technical/marketing lingo. Whether they are still relevant or not is not the point. "Cloud computing" is almost comical in its childishness when you think about it for a minute. "Full stack" is a bit of a pretentious nitpick on my part, I actually hesitated putting it in there but couldn't resist. I'm an embedd…

I always understood the term "full stack" to refer to a developer who has tried (and mastered some of) many different technologies and roles, including embedded, system, sysadmin, backend, desktop frontend, web frontend, DB stored procedures... It doesn't necessarily mean that such a person would be immediately proficient in a given technology (that depends on their recent experience), but given a few months' time th…

Yeah, I consider myself "full stack" because I actively learn different types of software development that are outside of my current role, which is web front-end and backend (mostly Go and Postgres). I am proficient in s variety of languages, platforms, etc (e.g I love messing with embedded devices), and prefer to advertise my flexibility over whatever area I feel I am best at.

I've met quite a few who are happy specializing and essentially restricting themselves to a couple of technologies. When they call themselves "full stack", I get a bit annoyed, since I feel it should mean more than that.

So yeah, if you give me a month, I'm sure I can become productive in any given stack, and given a year, I'll be mostly indistinguishable from a specialist.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#255

Post by beatgammit »

auggierose wrote: post #70
simias wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how to interpret your reply in the context of what the parent is saying. Of course if it's not common to use the term then people will find it odd, out of place or maybe even pretentious. If some influential people manage to push it, eventually it'll be accepted. If our industry as a whole managed to utter words like "cloud computing", "webscale" or "full stack" with a straight face I really think "libre…

I never uttered "full stack" with a straight face. Actually, in the last interview I had with a CEO where he asked if I was a "full stack developer" I just laughed.

Eh, I would absolutely say "yes" to that, and qualify it by what that means for me:

- practical experience with embedded devices - popular databases - web frontend APIs and common frameworks - popular backed platforms - Dev OPs and other types of automation

A lot of developers specialize, and relatively few branch out from that. I use the term because I don't want to be stuck in a single role.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#256

Post by zemo »

lone_haxx0r wrote: post #237
zemo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPL-licensed projects can't link against non-GPL code. This provision is extended to cover plugins and functional extensions of interpreted environments. That's why a lot of people don't like the GPL. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfInterpreterIsGPL

But what do the plugins link against? As far as the plugin creator is concerned the license of the object files of the API could be MIT, closed source, GPL or whatever. He doesn't bundle any Blender code.

The GPL is written in such a way that the GPL argues that any plugin designed for a GPL-licensed application is itself GPL-licensed.

> If the main program and the plugins are a single combined program then this means you must license the plug-in under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license and distribute it with source code in a GPL-compliant way. A main program that is separate from its plug-ins makes no requirements for the plug-ins.

ok, so does Blender and a Blender plugin constitute a combined program?

> If the main program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, and they establish intimate communication by sharing complex data structures, or shipping complex data structures back and forth, that can make them one single combined program. A main program that uses simple fork and exec to invoke plug-ins and does not establish intimate communication between them results in the plug-ins being a separate program.

depends on the definition of "intimate communication".

Does a process that spawns another process and then communicates with that process over a unix pipe constitute "intimate communication"?

There's no section of definitions that provides a legal definition of "intimate communication". It also does not provide a legal definition of "control flow". If one system sends a message to another system and then takes action based on a response, is that control flow? Does it depend on whether or not the systems are synchronous? It also doesn't provide a legal definition for "dynamic linking".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Com...

> The FSF thus draws the line between "library" and "other program" via 1) "complexity" and "intimacy" of information exchange, and 2) mechanism (rather than semantics), but resigns that the question is not clear-cut and that in complex situations, case law will decide.

honestly I'm not sure anyone actually knows because it hasn't been tried in court and there isn't established case law.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#257

Post by mwfunk »

pjmlp wrote: post #239
hdfbdtbcdg wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which reaction?

Being enranged that companies just made what MIT style licenses allow them to do to start with, and creating derived licenses to work around it.

Yeah but those enraged people don't count- those are just whiners who didn't understand the licenses they were licensing their own work under. Or they don't understand the point of FLOSS to begin with- they thought that releasing their stuff as FLOSS was some sort of business or career move that would somehow benefit them later, which is rarely ever going to happen, and will almost certainly never happen to someone who's only contributing because they think it will personally benefit them someday. To those people, a PSA- just because some CS undergrad with self-diagnosed Aspergers and a trust fund who's never had a job in their lives told you on Slashdot that putting stuff on Github will someday make you rich or famous, doesn't mean it'll happen, no matter how much everyone involved wants that to be the world we live in. There are tons of great reasons to put stuff on Github, but none of them are related to money or fame or helping one's career.

Anyway, so then, when someone else somehow makes money using their code and they don't get a cut, of course that seems like "abuse" to them. If they had any idea what they were doing they would have realized that that's not "abuse" at all, because other people using their code for any purpose whatsoever is literally the point of the license.

It's just as bad if not worse when anyone reflexively GPL's their work without understanding that, because there's a freaking holy hell of a lot more legal consequences to understand about the GPL than there are about say, 2-clause BSDL, which is basically just "this is copyrighted by me and you can't remove my copyright" and "if you use this and something goes wrong, you can't sue me". If they didn't understand such a simple license, what hope do they have of understanding the GPL? None at all whatsoever. People who've been arguing about the GPL for 20+ years rarely understand the GPL, at least not in its entirety.

There's nothing wrong with someone making their code proprietary or GPL'd or whatever- it's their code, and it's their choice to make. But it's also their responsibility to understand all the consequences of that choice, and it's their responsibility to understand why they want to release their code in the first place.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#259

Post by wlesieutre »

Theodores wrote: post #213
Washuu wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blender 2.8 is literally the reason I am starting to actually learn 3D modelling. I have repeatedly tried 2.7 and could never get around that clunky interface along with the default mouse controls.

2.79b is what you get with stock Ubuntu. Is it worth getting 2.8 if one is starting now?

It hasn’t hit the official release yet, but I would. Otherwise you’re learning an interface that’ll go away in a month.

One benefit of 2.7 is that there are a more preexisting tutorials out for it, but 2.8 is getting quite a few as well.

I haven’t been following too closely on what the best new tutorials are, but I saw some linked here the other day: https://reddit.com/r/blender/comments/by7ejt/having_bounced_...

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#260

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

chii wrote: post #219
micmil wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshit. This is like saying someone that trained in Java will struggle learning Python, or someone that learned with C will have a hard time picking up Rust. With a few exceptions (Houdini probably being the prime example) all 3d graphics tools work in the same fashion. The concepts and techniques are universal, the only difference is the implementation. If you have even a modicum of experience with one thing, you…

> The concepts and techniques are universal, the only difference is the implementation. only someone who hasn't really used the tool in anger and mastered it would claim this. I can't even switch to eclipse from intellij and not have a huge productivity hit for several months. and that's just typing code! A real 3D modeller would have so much muscle memory for their modelling app of choice it't not funny.

I've been trying to learn SolidWorks, coming from Autodesm Inventor, and I can confirm- it's really hard to switch- SolidWorks is more powerful, even, and is better at what I want to do- and I've only been using Inventor off and on for around 4 years.

I can only imagine what it would be like to switch from something that you've used a flavor of for your whole career to something entirely new, and 3D modelling for animations is way more complex than what I've ever dealt with.

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