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

311–320 of 335 posts

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#311

Post by dang »

rolltiide wrote: post #250
dang wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I guess I just wish you guys would break down what you feel is unsubstantive "and/or flamebait". I feel like A LOT of assumptions about a fairly articulate comment are needed to make that conclusion. A quick re-reading I think that you made assumptions about who the spouse is, assumptions about Africa, or maybe misreading the black hole part when the context is Africa. Super meta vicariously offended someone expectin…

The idea of that comment being accurate or not doesn't even arise. Is anyone going to do a statistically significant survey of "large backers for open source donations"? Even if you did, you wouldn't get access to their conversations with their spouses, nor will anyone give you accurate information about what they want to "pretend to be". So there's no question of such a comment being a serious contribution to discussion. What it does fit—begging your pardon—is the genre of internet bullshit: someone making up a grand, provocative generalization because they're good at making up grand, provocative generalizations, that being the craft that a certain sort of internet commenter works on perfecting. If you post in that genre to HN, we're going to moderate you, because there's no thoughtful conversation to be had there—one can only pile on or fight back. It's a move in a game that doesn't lead to more interesting moves. That's what I mean by unsubstantive in this context. As for flamebait, you could start by not making casually insulting dismissals like "drop money into a blackhole in Africa". Saying that signals that you're trolling. Maybe you didn't mean to? Ok, but that actually doesn't matter, because an internet comment consists of how people read it and the effects that it has.

Let's look at it the other way. Let's say your intention is to contribute to thoughtful conversation and that you indeed know a lot about "how foundations make their decisions". I'm quite willing to believe that. In that case, though, you should make your contribution in a 180-degree different way. You need to explain what you know in terms that aren't grandiose and provocative, but rather, scrupulously accurate. You need to explain how you know it. You need to tie it to the topic at hand in a way that explains why it's relevant. And you need to somehow include the limits of what you know, to leave some oxygen for anyone who might know different things than you do. All that is not hard to do, but it requires a different genre of comment: more information, less grandstanding.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#312

Post by klez »

anchpop wrote: post #247
lone_haxx0r wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No it wouldn't, for software to be "Free software" it must be GPL-or-other-copyleft-license licensed, which aside from being trivially impossible in a world without intellectual property laws, also has different outcomes than placing the source in the public domain. For example nothing prevents me from taking some public domain code and including it in my closed-source application, but the GPL forbids this.

No, for free software to be "Free Software" it must respect the Four Freedoms (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html). GPL-or-other-copyleft-license happens to respect them, but so do the Apache, BSDs, MIT and other licenses which are not copyleft.

Note: "Copyleft" as opposed to simply Free Software entails reciprocity, e.g., the "viral" part of the GPL. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#313

Post by fsloth »

BeetleB wrote: post #263
fsloth wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if a term becomes mainstream it's use is obvious. If you need to explain the connotations of a word in a lengthy forum post it's a pretty good indicator the use of the word is not adviced unless you are a tredn setter. If Elon Musk started to use the word libre software it might become a common enough term. If I use the word libre software I would have to first explain the word 90% of the time and become embarr…

>If you need to explain the connotations of a word in a lengthy forum post it's a pretty good indicator the use of the word is not adviced That is the current reality with the word "free". Pretty much every HN/Reddit submission on free software will have this discussion, with plenty of people disagreeing with the use of the word "free". Unfortunately, the usual response is simply a denial of reality: "Those who don't…

I think the following analogue is apt: lots of people drink coffee in the post-Columbian world. When you order coffee and sugar most of the 8 billion people on the planet understand what you are talking about. However, if starbucks does not exist nobody understand what frappucino is. You can have the drink and have a very active internet group of frappucino afficionados, but despite the fact you know thousands of frappucinistas, still somehow the concept does not escape your internet sorority to a popular fame.

You've tried ordering the frappucino at the local diner, patiently explaining the merits of this fantastic bewerage, convinced by the zeal of your fellows that this thing is the best thing to happen to coffee bean ever. To no avail.

Or let's make this even more concrete. You are an english nobleman trying to order coffee in venice in 1614. No can do, coffee arrived in venice in 1615. Unless you know someone specific you cannot explain coffee to most people in venice 1614. In 1615 everyone knows, or think they know what it is, as clergymen banned coffee only little bit after it arrived...

My point is, you can have a very good idea but ideas don't spread by the merit of their goodness. I mean, we've know decades what we are doing to the biosphere but only now the large population is taking notice as shit starts to actually it the fan.

So people who discuss libre software fervently might be right, but that still does not mean you achieve anything by prosetylizing the concept to your employer.

Last analogue: You were stolen from Senegal and now are planting cotton in Georgia. A guy called Sam claims he owns you and will beat you if you try to leave. You are convinced slavery is wrong and that no one should be able to own another human being. Most of you fellow slaves agree but somehow you've failed to convince Sam and the rest of his farmer friends.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#315

Post by pjmlp »

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…

The "source available" movement was already a thing back in old days, before the rise of GPL.

I bought plenty of commercial software, specially developer tools, that had source available on the installation floppies.

If anything we are turning back to those days, after many are starting to realize how hard it is to keep a business living from donations and occasional consulting gigs.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#316

Post by bocklund »

thwarted wrote: post #187
kgwxd wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most CS students aren't developers and haven't yet been bitten hard enough by bad licensing, in fact, they likely hope to profit greatly creating proprietary software. If you believe in something, embrace it, if you're right, time will bring people around. When it comes to "libre", the need for such a distinction is supported by thousands of real life examples, over decades, of users getting burned hard by bad licens…

This is odd considering how relatively rare pre-packaged, proprietary software that makes boat loads of money actually is. CS students today are exposed to a lot more open source (look at what comes with a $5 hosting account) and SaaS, where the money is, today than 20, or even 10, years ago. Unless you're referring to games, but even the the big money making games make money on in-app purchases than with the sale of…

I disagree. It’s likely they go about almost all their day-to-day activities using proprietary (or at least not libre) software. Their primary OS (likely Windows or Mac), word processor, spreadsheets, presentations (Office or Google), email client, virtually every app on their phone (either platform). If they are in any non-CS, technical field, it is for sure using proprietary software (MATLAB, Autodesk, Adobe, ...). If they are in CS or a dev, they are probably using cloud platforms, GitHub, CI, an IDE, ...

Programming languages and code are so unique in being freely available, even the infrastructure around the them is proprietary.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#317

Post by Intermernet »

antidesitter wrote: post #203
0815test wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, then why does Blender need a development fund? Why wouldn't they have such a fund? Sponsoring is a viable FLOSS business model, and it heavily overlaps with support (which is discussed in your quote from the blogpost). The notion that "people" aren't "able to make money" with FLOSS is just a fallacy, and Blender itself is one of the clearest examples of how wrong it is - it was failing as a commercial prospec…

> The notion that "people" aren't "able to make money" with FLOSS is just a fallacy Which fallacy?

The one you quoted. Many people make money from open source software.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#318

Post by edflsafoiewq »

derefr wrote: post #127
asutekku wrote: post #81

When 90% of the plugins and tutorials are available for proprietary software it’s hard to support blender. It also doesn’t help that the UI of the blender is extremely hostile for new users. When other tools are easier to use and have better tooling it’s hard to justify the usage of blender.

> plugins are available for proprietary software I’m genuinely surprised that FOSS projects like Blender (or, for another example, GIMP) don’t offer ABI compatibility to allow the use of plugins made for the specific nonstandard ABIs of popular proprietary systems. Anyone know why they don’t? Is it just a platform thing—e.g. having to support those plugins would mean having to compile winelib into your project?

Blender addons are written in Python and routinely break between Blender versions (2.8 broke basically every existing addon because of API churn). If there is not even compatibility between Blender versions, there is no chance compatibility will be maintained with random proprietary programs.

Also many of the features are quite different than their equivalent elsewhere (armatures for instance).

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#319

Post by starbugs »

somatic wrote: post #310
starbugs wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what open source is not, per definition of the OSI: https://opensource.org/osd , see paragraph 6 "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor". What you are proposing is a form of a shared source license.

Here's the text of #6: "The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research." My thought is not to restrict anyone from doing anything. Rather that, for example, any profit-seeking entity can use any code, but that that profit-seeking entity must pay a st…

> My thought is not to restrict anyone from doing anything. Rather that, for example, any profit-seeking entity can use any code, but that that profit-seeking entity must pay a standard and proportional fee to the license-holder of that code, generally its author(s) and/or maintainer(s).

Well, so you are effectively restricting the field of endeavor. People who want to do business with the code licensed this way can no longer do so without having to pay while all others still can use the code freely. I don't think there's much room for interpretation as to whether this fulfills the term "discrimination".

What you can do instead is dual-license your code, offering more "favorable" terms in a second proprietary/commercial license to businesses. However, this usually comes with the caveat that licensees of the commercial license can now do proprietary changes without having to give them back to the community.

> the GNU/GPL don't qualify as "open source" software.

> It is to laugh.

What? I am afraid you are misinterpreting the text and/or confusing the terms of the General Public License. This says you should not place restrictions on the licenses of other software contained on the same medium. It doesn't say anything about derivative work. Why would this mean the GPL doesn't qualify as an open source license?

Here's a list of all OSI approved licenses: https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#320

Post by bad_user »

novok wrote: post #226
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…

Source available is useful for debugging at least. I sure wish I had 'source available' when making iOS apps!

It's not.

Looking at source code without the license to copy from it ... is a legal minefield ;-)

Post reply on HN