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Blender Is Free Software

code.blender.org

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Re: Blender Is Free Software

#231

Post by hdfbdtbcdg »

pjmlp wrote: post #185
bad_user wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Source available” licensing is useless. Many companies and many developers have tried to misappropriate the term “Open Source”, to make it be understood as “source available”, because Open Source / Free Software have sex appeal for developers, so they are trying to have their cake and eat it too. Don’t fall into that trap. The freedoms provided by both Open Source and Free Software licensing are well defined and mea…

The recent reaction of those developers how non-copyleft licenses are being "abused" kind of speaks otherwise.

Which reaction?

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#232

Post by xfer »

pvaldes wrote: post #168
rocky1138 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Yeah nice comparison to a single user software to a social networking application.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#233

Post by dang »

rolltiide wrote: post #183
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…

Large backers for open source donations barely exist because their spouses won't let them. People and their foundations barely have complete discretion over their money. So when it comes to donations their spouses want to pretend to be the next Bill and Melinda Gates and drop money into a black hole in Africa than a software tool. More awareness is possible. Different people in Africa contribute to open source too, b…

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait to Hacker News so we don't have to ban you again?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#234

Post by damon_c »

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.

Yes, exactly this.

As someone who had a prior career in VFX using mostly Autodesk and Adobe software, there are people who spend their whole career in one of these packages and have a lot of difficulty becoming fluent in a second one.

They are designed with completely different metaphors and workflows and yes, the end result is always pixels, but learning multiple high end creative software is nothing like learning different programming languages.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#235

Post by iamcreasy »

freedomben wrote: post #206
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…

I didn't realize Blender did video editing! I do very basic editing, mostly with Kdenlive. I will have to give Blender a try.

And Blender also does node based compositing. I think that's what Foundry Nuke is famous for.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#236

Post by lone_haxx0r »

klez wrote: post #6
Jonnax wrote: post #4

Can someone provide some context for this post? Are there calls to change Blender's license? Are add-on developers violating GPL? The post mentions that a bridge between open source and proprietary needs to be open source but the add-on itself doesn't? Is it just a "how dare you sell products closed source products on top of blender?" The business model of providing support is all well and good but it's just one. If…

I think this is for the recent surge of quasi-open-source license changes some products have gone through. That's why they underline the difference between free software and open source. Recently people started saying that the OSI's Open Source Definition is restrictive and obsolete, that having the sources available is enough, that it's not a problem to restrict usage, etc... That's why it's important to stress "fre…

In a world without intellectual property, source available would equal free software.

I think the FSF has tried to squash too many semantic, technical and legal subtleties into the GPL, the words free, libre, etc.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#237

Post by lone_haxx0r »

zemo wrote: post #96
forrestthewoods wrote: post #72

Wait a second. Shouldn’t it be possible for someone to sell a Blender add-on but it keep it closed source and non-GPL? That’s just writing code for an API. As we all know from Google vs Oracle case it would be disastrous if API’s could be copyrighted. GPL is “just” a copyright license. I’m not sure how Blender add-ons work though.

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.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#238

Post by starbugs »

mattigames wrote: post #212
_bxg1 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. The idea of a world where every piece of software is free and open is a nice one, but unfortunately we live in a society where people have to be compensated for their time in order to live, and doing support won't always cut it. Edit: To be clear, I'm not downplaying that ideal, only pointing out that at least in the United States it's pretty unrealistic. In some other western countries they don't balk at the i…

Nobody is talking about every piece of software having to be free; if they want to make add-ons that can be sell they should have made those plugins for a software that allows such financing model such creating plugins for Autodesk Maya.

The statement in the article makes it sound as if providing documentation, support, etc. is a somewhat reliable way to get your work on Blender plugins and — implied — on other free and open-source software funded. I guess that's the reason for the impression that this somehow generalizes the statement to a broader software market.

"Your customers will love you!" even implies that this way of doing business is somehow superior to other licensing models.

I'd say: Your customers might love you, but for most projects this is likely also going to translate to "your customers won't pay you".

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#239

Post by pjmlp »

hdfbdtbcdg wrote: post #231
pjmlp wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recent reaction of those developers how non-copyleft licenses are being "abused" kind of speaks otherwise.

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.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#240

Post by amenod »

simias wrote: post #134
ademup wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh wow, "full stack" is now not only unfashionable, but considered so ridiculous as to be laughable? "Cloud" I get, it has always been a nonsensical marketing term, but "full stack" at least has honest roots in the term LAMP. I still provision my own Linux (VPS) servers, administer MariaDB on them and string it all together with PHP and sprinkle in non-trivial Javascrpt for UI and graphing. My company is profitable,…

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 they would produce solid code in any of these areas, and within a year they would be proficient in it.

In my understanding it has more to do with a person's ability to learn, or lack of fear from learning, if you wish.

Of course I have met my share of "full stack" devs (PHP + JS), but that's the same as with "senior" devs... Having a job title and being one is not the same thing.

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