Blender market vs the opensource ideal

In the past people contributed to blender add-ons for free.
Scripts like Rigify, Molecular, import and export script and lots of other great large super advanced scripts.
Those advanced script are free available open-sourced for everyone.
Blender is a success story based upon them, and blender wouldnt be blender without them.

All who use blender build upon that free framework.
And (without copyright violations) are free to improve blender.

Now there is blender market, and people start selling scripts.
There is nothing wrong with someone earning some bucks.
I do understand making money is nice.

However if all future great scripts will be on blender Market.
Blender development will stall, copyright issues will emerge.
And then we loose a great peace of open-source software.

I wonder what people’s standpoint is on this.

Would it be a solution perhaps to put such script addons to a 1 year right to sell and be opensource after ?

I think it’s up to the add-on developers to decide whether they want to sell them or not.

This seems like a fairly unlikely outcome. If it will make you feel better consider Eclipse as an example of a healthy open source application that is very dependent on plugins and is able to support a marketplace with offerings under a variety of licenses. Doing a quick search by license type gives the following results:

  • EPL (516)
  • Commercial (374)
  • Commercial - Free (131)
  • GPL (111)
  • Other (100)
  • Apache 2.0 (90)
  • Other Open Source (63)
  • LGPL (57)
  • Free for non-commerical use (51)
  • BSD (38)
  • Free EPL (35)
  • Free GPL (28)
  • Free for non-commercial use (14)
  • MIT (14)
  • Free LGPL (9)
  • Free CPL (3)

Commercial licenses are certainly well represented but there is no shortage of open source offerings. I doubt the availability of a Blender Market place, that isn’t even directly connected to the project, will dramatically change the Blender addon landscape in the immediate future. Don’t panic and carry-on.

Even the people who have released things on the marketplace have also made other things available for free. You predict that “all future great scripts will be on blender Market” but why? All of them? Really? What evidence do you have that no one wants to develop free addons anymore? People are still developing free addons as we speak, and others are developing temporarily paid addons as you suggest.

You seem to be pleading for things to be…exactly as they already are. Well, you’ve already got your wish. Don’t worry dude. There will still be plenty of free stuff.

This only applies to addons, it would be nigh on impossible to make premium features coded in C if they were to be formally committed to Master.

Many of the people who are currently selling their addon solutions are also sending a part of their revenue to the Blender development fund via an automated system, so the more people buy, the larger the amount of funds the BF can use to hire new developers and accelerate development of Blender.

If I am not mistaken all the addons you can buy on Blender Market are sold under GPL licence. It is IMHO a good way to support the non-ofiicial developers and keep the development open-source…

People have said for years that selling addons/plugins and scripts will stop the flow of free scripts from coming (and ultimately end Blender development if they are being dramatic) in which I have always pointed to scriptspot (among others) because even a super-expensive software like 3DS Max doesn’t stop people from making free scripts and plugins. It only needs to be popular enough which Blender definitely is.

I think all of the add-ons in the CGCookie Marketplace are GPL licensed. Open Source doesn’t necessitate that things be given away freely, just that the source code is available with distribution.

That said, there will always be free add-ons as well.

You mention that Rigify was developed completely for free. That’s wrong. I paid for some of it’s development myself. Don’t mind it being GPL at all (not that I think Cessen would have given me a choice :wink: ) and I don’t mind paying for other GPL add-ons provided they do what I need them to.

At least as far as Rigify goes, you’re arguing from a fictional foundation.

just blender jumping the shark and selling out, thats all.

there’s pro’s & cons for both sides.
buying & selling of addons:
I prefer the bsurfaces crowd funding method. reach a goal, release more of the full version free.
The cost of addons is a disadvantage to those with less money.
Under the GPL, I can buy your addon then legally distribute for free. *without author updates I guess. (not sure on update system for marketplace) ** I have been requested in the past to “Stop distributing my GPL addon” even though it was free… & GPL…
Higher end addons due to time taken to write may be sold, rather than donated to BF
There’s no guarantee the author will update regular for all api breaks.

Materials is another section that’s interesting to me. How people think they can copyright combinations of blender built in functions as their own (Nodes/Materials/Textures) is beyond my understanding.

Yeah. And how people think they can copyright combinations of English’s built in functions as their own (words/punctuation) is beyond my understanding too.

Do you have any proof of this? The only thing you can definitively copyright to my knowledge (other than the art) are the image textures used within the scene providing they are hand made.

If someone somehow actually made a complex node setup that mimicked how it was done for a Blender Market item without actually buying the item, I don’t see why Blender users would want to pull that guy into a litigation storm.

On those arguing the merits, is it not enough that many of these people are willing for some of their profit to go fund the development of Blender, this essentially means that the more paid items are bought, the more free functionality and tools we get in Blender itself.

Well i was wondered to people’s reaction.

As a partial job coder and designer in c++ c# and some other languages, i have not had jobs based on opensource code so far.
The point that triggered this for me was someone asking for some coding help.
Which later turned out to be something that payed him (not related to blender market).
Suddenly i was giving free support rewriting and removing his code bugs.
I would have felt ok if I wouldnt have been notified later about it by someone else.
I wasnt in for the money, I thought to help, and then someone runs away with cash.
Money can spoil things, and waste people manners i thought then.

Oh and i wasnt around when rigify was created for Blender, I didnt knew that, so i assumed wrong there; sorry.
I also see dough that Molecular has another option to fund the developer (its another way of saying thanks to that developer).

I’m still wondered, what if those people got credited inside Blender, so if you build a free add-on in Blender
You get your name, and perhaps a small photo-picture thats part of the blender code. (or a link to your CG website)
It might for some mean something more rewarding then dollars, for those who develop with free-open-source idea mind.
Those who just see some coding as a challenge and once in a while set themselves a coding targets.

Never thought of materials that way… its like selling math… hmm strange yes…

The whole thing got me a bit troubled, when time permits id like to write later this year or next year some add-on.
I hope for some more reactions here, maybe its me who needs to change, maybe i am old fashioned about free code, but so far i like to stand by the free idea; its to the author sure, but this same author used blender for free; i guess i will enjoy giving something back someday.

In terms of not being able to afford the addon you need, one way to get the money is to make it through your own Blender Market product.

As far as I know, Blendermarket is by no means a premium club and anyone can sell providing they have the skills needed to produce a quality product, some of the stuff on there are just unshaded models so the standards are also not astronomical and thus within an easy reach of most.

Want the money to buy those products, then go make something and register as a vendor.

I understand the position of some that don’t want to see “Pay Walls” preventing access to features they might need.

The issue is that without the finical incentive, the add-on would not exist in the first place. We will hopefully see an increase in the quality and number of Add-ons made for Blender over the next few months.

But at the end of the day all the add-ons are GPL so the market serves as more of a “Donation Guardian” rather than a “Pay Wall” because you don’t technically have to pay to use or get the scripts.

That’s a silly argument against selling shaders and textures. Creating shaders is a dedicated job at most studios, and the node system is really nothing more than a visual programming language. Drawing the distinction between addons and complex shading networks (both of which can take massive amounts of time, research, and patience to create and test) is as ridiculous as saying that a script written in one language is worth money while another isn’t. People who are against a for-profit development model either don’t respect the time of the coder/artist who created the tool, or even worse don’t respect their own time. If a $15 tool saves you only a single hour of work over its lifetime, it has already paid for itself. 3D tool development is difficult, and most people understand this. Only in the Open Source community would this conversation even be happening, but there are plenty of Blender users who appreciate that saving time is saving money, and these are the users who will help the market grow. And as more and more professional and money-making artists turn to Blender from other packages, they will come in realizing that $15 for a tool like Gaffer or the object paint-to-place addon is an absolute STEAL.

I like paid addons. While free things are nice, things that won’t stop working in a couple months and are actually maintained are much better.

While paying for the addon is not a real guarantee of continued maintenance, it’s certainly an incentive for the author.

m9105826,
As someone who has spent 100’s of hours collecting materials/textures/nodes & building materials libraries, also writing & collecting & updating & documenting & distributing addons/materials in bundles libraries for around 7 years now, I understand the time & effort that is put into those areas. It’s hard work. It’s harder work trying to keep up with maintaining & updating for releases. I also understand the download = potential income for Blender too, so don’t get me wrong, I’m not against the marketplace model. If small studios & dedicated artists need a tool & it’s inexpensive, they will buy.
I do however have reservations as do others that quality addons & materials will move to a pay system, whilst some of these things could be better used in Blender. “Why Develop in Blender when I can sell my addon?” is an issue that may arise.
I don’t doubt that the Pay for addon system will work, it’s worked several times already in the past. I do wonder if it will hurt addons dev, but then, in the past, some addons devs who do paid work have joined the dev team & benefited Blender. Only time will tell.

If there was a middle ground somewhere…
With addons if they are really that good, why not sell until a target is met, then donate to Blender so it get’s some goodies. The author has money, BF has percent from sales, maybe the author could then ask approval for inclusion in Blender to join BF Addons team & update there .

As for materials, I’m entitled to my opinion.
I think they should be shared so others can learn.
If people need better than that & are willing to buy better systems to save time, then I’m sure they will.

IMO… Blender Cookie Market is against ‘open source’ knowledge (and as Blender Cookie with it’s Citizen membership… To pay for a privilege of being part of open source?). Who paved a road that ‘you’ know proclaim as ‘yours’?

Sorry, but I agree with: Use for good, Share for better, Teach best!
If you tell ppl they’re sick… then they’ll buy a medicine. Because they believe in good and you. Just another way of how to exploit the ‘unlucky’, ‘untalented’… underprivileged.