Back to just how narrow this US Supreme Court decision was.
Imagine that we have a competitor (of any license, open or closed) - Madayax - and they add a “Blender Migration” feature. When writing scripts for Madayax you can now just “import bpy” and have most blender scripts run without error. They have written their own implementation but exposed it in a way that mirrors our own. That Supreme Court ruling is saying that we can’t stop them from doing so. That’s it. Its just about how copyright applies to the actual names and organization of declarations. That we specifically named it “bpy” is not protected, but is fair use and anyone can call their own version “bpy” too.
Just the fact that alternative bpy’s may exist doesn’t void blenders license though, to use an addon WITH blender it has to abide with it’s license. Can addons exist with a different license that can loaded into this hypothetical alternative bpy host without violating that hosts license? sure thing! however when used with blender it HAS to abide by the blender license. Can you force the author of said addon to blenders license? not a chance, can you prevent users from loading this addon into blender and breaking the license? Theoretically yes blender could refuse to load addons that do not explicitly declare them selves with a compatible license but that sort of thing is currently not enforced.
Just the existence of API doesn’t shield you from having to abide by the license of the host application, nor does coming up with an hypothetical “legal paradox”, the paradox never existed, things can be legal in one activity while being illegal in another setting, this happens all the time.
It’s perfectly legal to own a knife and use it to spread butter on toast, using that same knife to stab your noisy neighbor is a different matter. hypothesizing well the knife cannot be legal and illegal at the same time therefore I’m going to randomly pick one of the two options and either declare buttering toast illegal or stabbing my neighbor legal is just not how that works.
The whole discussion is really a bit pointless because:
The SCOTUS decided that it was fair use of Google to implement parts of Oracle’s API. It doesn’t mean that APIs aren’t copyrightable in the U.S. anymore. It doesn’t invalidate licenses like GPLv3. Fair use is still an affirmative defense.
Us non-lawyers don’t have the required legal expertise to decide whether or not the GPLv3 license is enforceable for Blender’s add-ons. Even if we were lawyers it would ultimately be up to a court to provide a decision on this or at least on a comparable case that would equally apply to Blender. Until then it’s reasonable to follow the FSF’s interpretation, who have actual lawyers involved in the creation of licenses.
Law aside, Could someone explain why it would be something “bad” that for example SideFx or Substance create a blender plugin with some non-GPL compliant part? Because i think most users would actually be quite happy to benefit of such plugin.
@BD3D This discussion is entirely about the law and the implication of licenses. Aside from the law, purely from a technical standpoint, nothing would be stopping a developer from distributing / selling an add-on without adhering to the GPLv3. It just wouldn’t be legal and they would risk getting sued. Additionally, the developer would profit off Blender without contributing their code back to the open source community.
However, it is legally possible to develop a GPLv3 licensed add-on that calls a closed-source binary. As mentioned in the discussion above, the Quad Remesher add-on is an example for this. See the linked FAQ for more information what FSF considers permitted.
Suddenly, everyone is an expert in law, in licensing, and in telling people what they can and cannot do. Cool!
No, we aren’t lawyers and neither is @LucaRood, which is precisely the point. The whole thread was started because he gave an interpretation of current copyright law and the SCOTUS ruling as a layman. Members of the community didn’t agree with his opinion and provided counter-arguments.
I don’t know in all countries but it is normal that the decision of the supreme court change the way to read the law, not only one particular case. In my country it is absolute normal. And in USA is similar because the way that they have to work in justice. Where jurisprudency have a big weight.
to give you an example, in my country the supreme court decide that one point of the houses loans where excesive and automatically it was the same for almost all the loans of the country. they didn’t change the law, only change the way to understand it and automatically it is the same for all the situations
The biggest problem right now is that most of us still don’t really seem to know what the ruling actually means for Open source and Blender in particular, at the moment.
We aren’t discussing whether this will change anything or not. We are apparently just very uncertain about how or what this actually means. And I agree with Ton here - while we can discuss this matter the legal implications should ultimately remain with the lawyers of FSF or compareable authoroties in this case.
Until then everybody’s best bet is to continue using the legal understandings as it was so far. When there is definitive word on how things will change from now on we can adapt.
Nobody here is saying that nothing will change. All we are saying is: We aren’t sure yet and the whole discussion is simply our best understanding, at the moment. It’s good to discuss and anticipate what might most likely happen. Ultimately we won’t be the ones in this thread to interpret a legally binding consequence and it doesn’t make sense to change any legal lines based on assumptions.
@SpookyDoom IMHO it doesn’t really change much for Blender or other open source projects as in the EU APIs are already not protected by copyright. It may have a positive effect in the U.S. as future cases about copied APIs might be considered fair use as well, but that remains to be seen.
The conclusion that @LucaRood drew that APIs not being protected by copyright would imply that add-ons don’t have to adhere to the license of the implementation of the API, is his own opinion and contrary to what the FSF states.
I am in this FLOSS bizz for two decades now, and seen these kind of discussions many times.
A common issue is that smart developers throw their intellect at law and licenses with the same energy as they handle code. Unfortunately that’s not entirely the same, to say it mildly.
But an analogy that does work for me: even in your best programs bugs appear, and law has similar flaws. Sometimes you can fix the bugs, sometimes you have to redesign parts, and often you decide to not get lost in details and move on. Because it always works better to focus on the actual purpose. And for Blender that is:
Get the world’s best 3D technology in the hands of artists, as free/open source software.
but that does not necessarily mean being crippled when collaborating with non open-source software model (which so far is the case unfortunately, many big companies openly said that they really want to propose cool plugin for blender but the idea always die due to GPL ). The goal is not to impose a benevolent dictatorship on the whole 3D industry haha
So it’s would be really nice to have such bridge working legally, it would bring many opportunities that would result being extremely benefitial for the users, they are the most important part of the software after all
In my opinion having such a bridge is giving up the basic freedoms and goals of Blender.
As Ton stated:
Get the world’s best 3D technology in the hands of artists, as free/open source software.
If this was allowed it would instead be:
Provide some 3D technology to the hands of the artists, as free/open source software.
If you side step the GPL, then you are not following the purpose of the Blender project in my opinion. To me it is quite clear that pushing for proprietary and closed addons is not promoting free and open source software.
Instead, this is promoting closed source and costly pipelines. This is not beneficial for the users in the long run and it never has been. The only one this benefits is the addon developers and the companies behind them.
Because i think most users would actually be quite happy to benefit of such plugin.
). The goal is not to impose a benevolent dictatorship on the whole 3D industry haha
