I don’t want to put quotes and put anyone in awkward situation, and also because you’re right, this is twisting things. Two separate announcements were made: extensions are becoming a thing, which will be addons, assets, keymaps and themes, and that Blender would launch extensions platform for add-ons and themes. But my point is that it’s really difficult to not get incorrect expectations when you’re exposed to those news. Initial announcements for platform said that we were focusing on add-ons for the moment, which invites room for speculation that assets are next.
I totally agree this is 100% positive. After all this is additive change, it’s only gonna add more cool stuff, it’s not taking anything away or even changing anything for worse. But as I said I see two goals here: shipped assets with Blender and ability to share assets, and I think people who expected second will be disappointed. Doesn’t mean first one will not get everyone excited of course.
I see things differently here. Objects (with meshes, materials, etc) can most definitely be infringing on copyright, and that might not be easy to check.
Is this gonna be problem for Blender? Because add-ons now can do that as well, they might be shipping copyrighted, non-GPL python code, they also include images, matcaps, node groups, base meshes and etc. Basically everyone who wants to ship assets now wraps it as add-on, because there is no other way (one more thing I feer will be common in the future: people will bypass asset extensions just to use features of add-on extensions) and we don’t check for those, we can’t realistically. My assumption was that if copyright infringement is found it’s up to developer to respond and only thing we should do is take it down.
We have add-ons now that come with quite a lot of assets, like… A LOT. We should be concerned about those too then, or make rule for future to only accept code. What we do now for moderation is just to point out that it’s their responsibility to make sure copyright is not infringed.
That’s why I said that it’s still open who’s going to do the curating, and who’s going to do the creation of those assets. Of course people in the community are welcome to help out!
Definitely. I hope at least it will be more relaxed, so that trustworthy sources, like artists that are close to modules, like Erindale can share too. But I’m not sure community-curation is gonna be feasible, it’ll always gonna fall on us.