Changing the common ground for all volunteers and the whole community is very different from individual decisions.
People who currently offer paid addons for Blender are aware of the situation. They know, their solution can not be a closed proprietary one. This leads to the fortunate situation that some of them would even be open to work with core developers to bring parts of their solution directly into Blender to be useful for everyone. It is highly unlikely from my point of view that this would happen under different licensing terms.
That is a problem with the perception of the people of the economy, who think it is a zero sum game where the total is already established and you can only redistribute what already exists. That is not so, what happens is that it grows and in the end there are more people to divide between the Open Source and CLosed SOurce.
The developers of Blender, Brecth, Pablo Dobarro, ⌠are people that if I wanted to I could leave blender tomorrow and earn 60-70k doing the same thing elsewhere. They donât do it because they donât want to.
There are thousands of people, that contributed code to blender and if they werenât able to make a living, theyâd not be able to contribute. Big Part of FOSS is using your expertiese to work on paid projects while also using it to contribute while not working.
But that contribion builds your knowledge and FOSS is often the basis of the projects, youâre getting paid for.
I read the git logs all days and always see the same names. Rarely a external patch is commited. Itâs a complete minority. And normally is to solve a simple thing.
Thatâs not what i wrote! And even if those addon developers were working with the core developers in the future on tighter integrations, it could easily happen that all the commits are from the core developers. There can be many people behind commits.
Yea of cource, because external developments are usually getting merged in a chunk at once!
and Iâm going to leave this thread now, because it is a pointless duiscussion.
There is no perfect lisence and all come with advantages and disatvantages. Blenders lisence works as it is and nobody at the blender foundation will ever touch it, because most of those people there believe in the benefits of their lisence and also, because they legally canât change it, because the lisence prohibits it.
We canât say if blender wouldt have succeeded with a difrent lisence and there are many justified doubts.
It is as it is and the software is well and growing, the community is growing, more and more companies support blender and include it in their workflow and a lot of great features for blender (cryptomatte being the most recent example) have come out of these companies developing for blender.
The lisence is not going to change.
all this thread does is spread toxicity, because of an argument, that simply cannot be resolved, because there isnât a single perfect always-right way and because as I stated: the lisence cannot be changedâŚ
I meant to say, that external blender developments usually have their own repos and their external branches get merged at once so the commits from these external contributers are less often.
Rarely devs merge a branch without a long process that begin with create that branch in git before.
And that is other example of fail of the actual system in blender. Nobody can do improvements without a long and boring checking. Instead of simple addon that do the same.
This is vital to keep Blender stable and to maintain code quality. Accepting patches left and right without a thorough review process would invite chaos.
Instead of simple addon that do the same.
Nothing is stopping anyone from distributing add-ons or their own patched Blender build. In this case, licensing isnât even a question, since the alternative (getting a patch into Blender master) would have been open source anyway.
I guess Blender donât need to change its licence model, but provide better api for independent developers jump in some areas.
For example modifiers, itâs 2019 and we stil canât install new modifiers without having to recompile blender or using a special patched build.
There are a lot of modifier possibilities (like Box UV Mapping, Instanced Array, Instancer Scatter, Parametric Objects, Remove Doubles,âŚ) that end up being dependent on the time and effort of the BF developers and may never happen because they are not a priority.
It could be a great field for brand new features within the blender ecosystem without overwhelming the core team.
Another example is the render api, external render engines canât have the same level of integration like Cycles has (fast export, RT, âŚ) without having to use a special patched build (eg: octane and v-ray).
It isnât enough to send an email to almost everyone, you canât assume agreement if you donât get an answer, and the foundation doesnât have real names for every contributor and would have old and invalid emails for many. And some are dead.
Best example is to use something tangible and make it not about copyright. You want to give your car to a local society so you and they sign a legal agreement that it can only be used for one charitable purpose. They canât, years later, change their mind and use it for something else without getting your approval to change the agreement. And they canât even do so if they canât get in touch with you and just assume you are okay with it. They signed an agreement and are stuck with it unless both of you agree to a change.
A lot of this discussion seems to imply that the developers donât understand the differences between the licenses and can be persuaded. But I assure you that the average developer is quite familiar, more so than the average user.
So again, if could magically find all the hundreds of people who have contributed to blender source and ask them, there would be a fair number that would say âI used my free time, knowledge, experience, and skill to freely contribute to a project that would remain âfreeâ in the way it was considered at the time I made that contribution. I donât agree that some for-profit entity can take my contribution, incorporate into something proprietary that they could then sell. That is not part of what I considered âfreeâ at the time.â
And, as mentioned, for every person (out of those hundreds) who do not agree with the change you have to somehow replace their contribution in a way that isnât just copying what they did.
How would a license change help with those âdevelopment problemsâ?
The small issue you are ignoring is that the responsible people are not interested in having a debate about a change.
Also, if such a change took place, you can be sure that several contributors wouldnât agree to it. As a consequence all their contributions would need to be replaced. This would require a massive investment just to get back to normal, followed by a more closed ecosystem. There is literally no chance this is going to happen. There is not even the need for an open debate.
It is not just a matter of contacting each of the hundreds of developers who contributed code by e-mail. All of them should also agree on the license change.
Some people think that developers are a kind of stupid people who have been fooled by the GPL. I am sure that the vast majority of them not only know the license, but also that they would not have contributed their work if Blender had not had the GPL license, with which they feel protected.
If the Blender license does not satisfy you, the best thing you can do is develop you code for another of the hundreds of non-GPL softwares out there whose license satisfies you