I don’t think that the “developers going closed source” fear is a proper fear.
What’s happening right now is that there are developers that don’t want to deal with GPL and don’t like it, and there are developers that accept to deal with GPL, the difference this will make is that SOME developers may accept the GPL with this, because the plugins themeselves would be binaries, after that anyone can ask for the code with the written offer, or the plugin can include the code in it’s download, as the GPL mandates.
Also developers know that they can make the code as obscure as they want, in the case they want to, I don’t like the idea, but the GPL / Open Source thing IMHO is just a excuse in some situations, in some others those developers want to retain all the I.P. as theirs to sell the source to a bigger company but…
… I think in this case developers don’t understand two things:
- They can dual license their code, so they can still sell the code to closed source companies, because in practice they CANNOT implement a single line of code in their packages unless they purchase the code, even when the code is open source, so ADesk for example has only one way of implementing an Open Mesh Effect that is licensed under GPL, and that is purchasing the code from the original author, because also the original author is the only one that can actually dual-license the code, since any other Open Source version developer got the code under GPL and that cannot be changed unless the original author agrees.
So IMHO all that Open Source fear is a non-sense, and the more I dig into the GPL the more I realise that it only helps Open Source but does not damage anything in other platforms.
So while some developers may prefer to distribute their Open Mesh effect plugins as binaries, that does not means those plugins are not under GPL, but at the same time that does not means that they cannot have another version under a custom license fully closed for other packages like Max, Maya or any other, and no company can “copy” and implement their code into their packages unless they purchase the code from the original author.
In the long run I only see a situation where both developers and users understand the GPL better and loose fears.
On the other side, Blender will not become an empty shell because the main core development team has never depended on what addon developers do, so the development will continue, with a big difference, right now there are things that can only be tackled from core, and some of them are not implemented because of many reasons, like that the main core dev team don’t like what is being done there, so some patches are never commited regardless they may be super useful for the users, or for SOME users.
With Open Mesh Effect this can be avoided, and this won’t avoid developers contributing to Blender, but will allow many developers to properly implement their vision without “affecting” the main branch, and without leaving the users to decide if they want that perspective of a plugin/addon or not, but the developers would not be constrained to some requirements, that on the other side, are totally needed to maintain Blender with a high standard in code quality, something that they themeselves are still solving, and that’s why they are so strict with some of these things, and I agree with them personally.
But this will bring A LOT more freedom to the table, I sincerely hope they don’t react based on “fear” or possible “what if’s” but they react based on what could be a huge improvement and a big help to users and developers, always under GPL
Ok… I’m done with my chat, in resume, I don’t think that the fear to some people trying to go closed source should punish users in general.