Blender market vs the opensource ideal

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
41

People need to understand that nothing is free. (Even “free” healthcare is paid for through taxes for example) Blender developers don’t sit around neglecting their financial and family duties so they can code for the community out of the goodness of their hearts. Life isn’t a fairy tale, and its a simple fact that we need money to survive. These coders are getting paid through donations to the BF. Yeah you don’t have to pay for blender, but it would be nice if you donated to keep it going. So while some (probably most) don’t donate anything to the blender foundation, the rest who do are in essence paying for you.

Even free things are made for selfish reasons. This person may code and release an addon for free, but the motives are usually selfish (not in a bad way) such as gaining experience, or making a name for yourself so you can have better opportunities in the future. There’s nothing bad about doing things for yourself. In some cases (such as free addons) it benefits both parties.

Even paid addons benefits both parties. The coder gets compensated for his time. Do you really think it’s fair to expect an experienced programmer to sit down for 40+ hours because you feel entitled to a free feature? If you want it so bad, why not code it yourself? Probably because you don’t have the skills, or the time. This coder has put in countless hours, days, years, in learning a valuable skill. Its basic economics that if you want a service, you will pay someone the market value for that service.

Which brings me to my next point. I understand the fear of awesome blender features to be mostly paid, and the vanilla users will be left out of the loop regarding the these features. I understand that. However, this is not a reason to fear. This will actually improve blender with all the extra competition.

guy 1 creates a cool addon.
People buy it
Guy 2 Creates a similar yet better addon
More people buy it
Guy 1 lowers his price
Even more people buy it
Guy 3 comes along, makes an even better addon than guy 2, and makes it even cheaper than the other two.

Now the consumer (us) has a great product at a great price. You can only get this by allowing competition.

If there was no incentive to innovate, then Blender would become stale, and soon obsolete.

42

^ What this guy said.

43

@Scotchtapeworm speaks the truth.

44

Freedom never was real, it’s a twisted word which masters say when them allow you to speak. There’s only liberty of choice, which one abides, like it or not.
In this case I expect from sellers only to respect contracts. So where are those GPL add-ons to study, share and by chance attribute to? i.e. Contour is no more updated on Github, Gaffer is nowhere to be seen and so on… So it means only one needs to buy and share?

45

@MCHammond:

Out of interest what would your course of action be if you found an Add-on that was using code you shared!?

I guess I would just be bummed out that I have to buy my own code.

46

Get your facts straight. Contours wasnt updated till now due to code refactoring.

47

People are spending time and hard work to create excellent additional tools to make CG work easier and more effective. These tools, addons, material setups, models, etc. are all released under GPL. All anyone is asking in return for people to pay the equivalent of somewhere between a burger and a night at the movies.

Meanwhile, Blender development continues apace and Blender itself is still free of charge, along with almost countless free addons and even more such free addons still in development.

Nothing in that state of affairs is bringing an end to Blender development or holding anyone back from creating great art unless they pay up.

People have made great skin shaders without buying Matt’s set. In fact he still has a pretty awesome free one for everyone. And if you put in some time and effort to learn how skin shaders work, you could create one just as good as either that he sells all on your own. Blender artists have controlled complex lighting without the Gaffer addon. If that functionality is really important to you, perhaps you could do what Greg did and write some scripts to help automate that process. Or maybe you’d like someone else to do all that work for you. Good. Throw these guys a few bucks. Either one of these products costs less than your average pizza order, and I don’t hear anyone crying about how pizza should be free.

So what, honestly, is the problem here? Is it just that you don’t like paying for stuff, or if there someone who can state the problem more cogently than that?

48

Contours is indeed updated on Github. In fact you can find it here: http://github.com/cgcookie/retopology

That being said, there is no obligation under the GPL to publicly release the source code for free. You simply can’t stop others from releasing, modifying it, or otherwise using it as they wish.

49

that being said, reading the gpl helps too.

"When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not
price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you
have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for
this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it
if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it
in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.

To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid
anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights.
These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you
distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.

For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether
gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that
you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the
source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their
rights."

So as I read it, you can charge for code np. you can release as compiled .pyd, but you must provide the source code if asked & can charge for this release of source code.
lol, cans of worms.
$ 25 for the addon $ 1500 for the source code anyone?

50

Do not mix free software and open source, many ppl above obviously just not understend details.

Personally, my ideal is Red Hat business model, absolutely free and open code and ideas, high quality consulting for money, and they are feel good even in trouble IT times in past. Blender looks same, maybe a one notch close to comercial side, but it ok as artist creativity have no that property as ideas in programming (as initial RMS motivation, share code to make other ppl increase productivity of all community, you hardly will increase productivity of other artist by sharing a 2D texture or movie, not algorithm)

51

JonathanW

Contours is indeed updated on Github. In fact you can find it here: http://github.com/cgcookie/retopology

That being said, there is no obligation under the GPL to publicly release the source code for free. You simply can’t stop others from releasing, modifying it, or otherwise using it as they wish.

Was checking Github when Contour update was announced… more than a day ago. Much thanks.
Are you creator of add-ons or a mediator (middleman)?

Yes, anybody who gets the source can distribute it further and you have to give the source to anybody whom you gave the binary and asks for it (you can charge for that as well, but GPL restricts it to “no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source” and only if both binary and source is shipped on physical medium; internet download must be free).

&

You can only do that once (sell), since the first client can always become your competitor for the second client.

52

As BTolputt already mentioned, Rigify wasn’t created for free. Its first iteration was created during Sintel, which was partially paid and funded for by the Blender community. And then others such as BTolputt, PitchiPoy animation productions, and a small crowd-funding process later paid me to do further development on it. I also did development on it as part of other contracts, where I needed to add features for my own use. The only significant un-paid development was the partial re-write after Sintel (which, admittedly, was not trivial). Other than that, it’s been almost entirely maintenance work. I’d say at this point probably about 70% of the time that’s gone into Rigify was paid for in some way or another.

Really, it’s just different business models. In one model, you get paid up-front for the work you’re doing, and then the results are released for everyone to use. In the other, you do the work up-front and then release it for a fee to recoup your costs. I, personally, much prefer the former business model, and think that in the long run it makes a lot more sense for products that are infinitely and costlessly reproducible (and especially for productivity tools that people depend on). But I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with the latter, either, as long as everyone is up-front and honest about things. And having a rich ecosystem of multiple approaches is unlikely to be a bad thing–projects that might falter under one model can thrive under another, so we then get the best of all worlds.

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 think it’s extremely unlikely that all, or even most, great scripts/addons will be on the Blender Market. I love the CG Cookie guys, and have nothing but absolutely great things to say about them. And I think the Blender Market is a fantastic endeavour. But I, personally, can’t see myself selling anything on the Blender Market. In the same way that I want my 3D package and my code editor to be freely available and open source, it’s also important to me that any tools I build are also freely available and open source. And I know there are other addon developers and artists in the Blender community who feel similarly.

And that will likely create some competition, even, between the free/paid alternatives for things. For example, from what I’ve seen, the skin shaders on the Blender Market are top-notch (though I’ve not used them myself). But, if I need a skin shader for a project, I’m much more likely to build one for myself and subsequently release it for free. It’s not about avoiding paying for a quality shader–I have no problem with that, and I’m very supportive of the author. It’s, again, because I like my tools to be freely available and open. If I did that, and if the quality of the shader (both render and UX wise) was comparable to the one on the Blender Market (dunno if it would be), that would push the paid one to get even better. So I think a rich ecosystem like this will actually be really positive.

If you see something on the Blender Market that you wish was free, either create an alternative yourself, or find someone skilled to pay to create it for you. That will help keep the ecosystem healthy and will push the paid alternatives to get even better, which in turn will push the free ones to get better, etc.

Anyway… I think I’m rambling at this point.

Bottom line, I’m not worried at all. If things actually somehow get all doom-and-gloom closed (which I’m certain the CGCookie people don’t want and will work to prevent anyway), I will quit my job and personally work to make free alternatives to everything. (Well, maybe not. But I’ll try.)

53

This is how I feel with the way this conversation is going. I think the Blender Market is a good thing, and will draw more people into using it. People need money to live…period.

54

By all means, if we can’t find real problems to worry and complain about, let’s make up stuff instead.

55

Blender Market is a positive for the community.

i too share some of the concern of “one thing leads to another”. if you really want to put on your tinfoil hats, what if the people behind the blender foundation got tired of supporting the software and just sold it to Autodesk, who would then charge $500 bucks for a single seat license as the “affordable” alternative to their flagship softwares. it could happen. sketchup got sold off.

of course the GPL keeps it from being a real threat, because any fork that existed before the sell of the main source would still be GPL, so blender would continue. just under the trolling eye of the general public with no central authority to determine what gets changed or included. you could still have your blender with a side of malware. no problem.

point is, people gotta eat. and software takes time to produce and test and retest, and “oh, this doesn’t work on my computers” and blah blah. the developers should have the option to sell their work if they so choose. i do think they should have the decency not to try to support a 10 million dollar mortgage off their sales… but they should have the right to do that as well if they think their product is worth it.

do the naysayers think that 3d models produced with blender should be free no matter what? if that was the case. there would be no incentive to use blender at all, as all professionals would be forced to use other software to avoid that license stipulation. and blender would forever be a hobbyists toy.

56

I think you need to read what you quoted

57

Hi guys, as one of the new addon vendors (AutoMaps Texture Manager) on the CG Market site I thought I would weigh in with a few thoughts.

Legalities of GPL
I think the biggest point to make firstly is that addons for public distribution for usage within Blender must be licensed as GPL. This is due to the way addons work and are considered to be part of the Blender code when you run it. As far as I know it’s not valid to release an addon publicly that is not GPL licensed for use with Blender.

Practicalities of Copyright
Even if it were legal to copyright your addon script, it’s almost impossible to ensure it’s not copyable. Since addons are python text files, they are very easy to copy. It IS technically possible to pre-compile your script into a binary file, but from what I’ve read, it is very easy to decompile so it would really be pointless anyway.

So what do have then?
As an addon vendor I have a product that I’ve invested time into creating that can be purchased once and copied freely forever. This means that the code can be integrated into Blender trunk or redistributed by another party. If you did that it would be totally legal, but we might like you less! :slight_smile:

What are you paying for? Here’s what you are paying for:

• Immediate access to the latest version of the addon
• Access to official and direct support for the addon (bug fixes, feature requests, etc.) that would not be available for a user that received a free legal copy from someone else
• An alternative way of financially supporting the developer of the addon

The point is that the act of selling an addon on the market is really an alternative way of compensating the developer as well as creating an official path of support from the dev to the addon purchaser. It’s not really a paywall, because they’re so easy to copy.

A developer that creates an addon and distributes it for free (or even for donations) is not morally or legally responsible for it’s upkeep and/or for technical or customer support to the end user. Hopefully they make some time to do that, but there’s no guarantee. When you purchase an addon from the marketplace, there’s a more official relationship between the dev and end-user and I think there’s a higher level of accountability to keep the addon up to date and working for the customer.

To this end, I really don’t think the Marketplace addons are going to diminish the unpaid work by some devs as well as the paid work by other devs. I think the commercial addons do hit the sweet spot for professional users of Blender that use Blender commercially and are willing to pay for increased support of a Blender addon or asset. If the product can save you time in completing your commercial project, it’s probably worth a few bucks for a useful tool that also comes with reliable support.

58

macktruck6666 is right, a game compiled into a Blender runtime must be GPL, see here under “So I can make games without having to worry about the GPL, right?”, especially this portion:

With stand-alone games however, any data that is included inside the actual stand-alone executable is covered by the GPL.

59

The very first free software programs (GNU Emacs etc.) where distributed by the Free Software Foundation for money only. It was the easy sharing options on the internet that made most open source software available free of charge (as anyone who obtains the program can also aquire the source code which he in turn is allowed to sell or distribute for free).

Charging for a program is not against the “open source ideology”.

Fun fact: roughly 50% of all open source development is still paid work.

60

Saying that paying for GPL code is bad is pure evil ! Everyone likes freebies, but it’s a fact that only handful of free add-ons are supported. Most of the times those add-ons released and abandoned.

If paying for Add-ons allows having better tools that can be used in production, with maintenance and updates, and making sure it’s compatible with future Blender versions - so be it.