Somebody recently launched a new site "Blender Depot" which hosts a bunch of Blender add-ons and provides a batch install feature.
Some of the add-ons on this site are commercial plugins available for sale by their authors. All Blender plugins have to be GPL so this sort of redistribution is legal but some of these authors have been rather upset about it. So a large argument ensued on the Blender forums about the GPL, the ethics of software redistribution even when copyright law says it is okay, etc.
Didn't the blog article just point out an obvious loophole of turning the addon into a bridge to an external non-GPL module, and putting some critical functionality into the non-GPL part?
Of course, developing such addons will be harder, but even moving just some pointless, trivial, easily rewritten code to the non-GPL part would force people who want to redistribute it to rewrite that part.
Or even completely subverting the spirit (but probably not the law) of the GPL by building a small non-GPL "DRM server" that is called and checked from the GPL'd module, and having the open source part refuse to work if this server isn't present? Of course, anyone would be invited to take the GPL'ed code and remove the checks, but it would shift the cost from "redistribute the version for free" to creating and maintaining a fork, which might be enough to get people to pay instead.
I don't think using an API of a GPL software means your software "has to be" GPL. For example, not all software running on Linux using Linux APIs (syscalls) is GPL.
> NOTE! This copyright does not cover user programs that use kernel
services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use
of the kernel, and does not fall under the heading of "derived work".
Linux’s exception is because you need its header files to compile c code that uses the kernel. If someone created an extension that provided a json api to blendr, it seems that would need to be open source but callers would not since nothing would need to be compiled against gpl code.
Whether or not "using an API" requires your software to be GPL depends on how it's implemented.
Going by GNU's description of what does and does not extend the GPL requirement[1] and how Blender plugins works, to me at least it seems they very clearly have to be GPL. Unless someone took the route that is common in closed source Linux drivers of having a small open source module that communicates with a binary blob where the majority of the actual interesting code is, but I have not seen any Blender plugins like that.
The Linux kernel actually provides a specific license exemption[2] for the headers that makes software using syscalls not bound by the GPL.
Actually this is exactly what we did with the renderman addon for Blender. And AFAIK how other renderer addons work.
Frankly if you want to be doing any meaningful computation in your addon it probably makes sense to go this route and have the closed source part in C while the addon "bridge" is python.
>I don't think using an API of a GPL software means your software "has to be" GPL.
We should GPL the software that is calling the Api of the GPL software.
>not all software running on Linux using Linux APIs (syscalls) is GPL
This is because linus Torvold(Other contributors) has given the syscall exception along with GPL-2.0. That's why there exists all kind of proprietary software running on top linux os.
Note: I am an open source officer I deal on this topic very often
From what I can see, Blender is trying to pretend it's a hard-and-fast rule, and they are requiring addon authors to label their work as open source to sell on their store.
I think if it did mean that, Linux would be abandoned by most major companies overnight, as you could not develop non-GPL binaries for it; I do however believe Blender is in the wrong here.
Maybe all the confusion seen in this thread about what does and doesn't fall under GPL is the reason people take issue with it, moreso than what it actually does.
> Some of the add-one on this site are commercial plugins available for sale by their authors. All Blender plugins have to be GPL
Just a side-note about the distinctions between open-source, free software, and commercial software. The US government considers any software that has a license and is available to the public “commercial”. So all GNU software in their view is commercial. It’s not a legal distinction of whether money is charged, it’s whether the software has a license and is public.
U.S. law governing federal procurement (U.S. Code Title 41, Chapter 7, Section 403) defines "commercial item" as including "Any item, other than real property, that is of a type customarily used by the general public or by non-governmental entities for purposes other than governmental purposes (i.e., it has some non-government use), and (i) Has been sold, leased, or licensed to the general public; or (ii) Has been offered for sale, lease, or license to the general public ...".
i noticed the same problem with the use of the term proprietary because that simply means non-standard. there is plenty of non-standard Free Software. and there is also plenty of commercially sold Free Software (RHEL for example)
the only term that i am aware of that really works is non-free.
as more and more companies sell FOSS licensed software, that definition is going to change. commercial software as the opposite of Free Software worked as long as the majority of Free Software products were generally free as in beverage in addition to having a free license. "Commercial Open Source" is a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_open_source_applica...
> Some of the add-ons on this site are commercial plugins available for sale by their authors. All Blender plugins have to be GPL so this sort of redistribution is legal
Only if the people between blender depot has a copy distributed under the gpl? Granted, the most likely way they'd get a copy would be under the gpl (get a copy from someone that purchased the plug-in).
But it does not immediately follow that its trivial to legally redistribute the latest copy of a gpl plug-in, unless you purchase new versions as they are released.
So the classic case of "I chose GPL because everybody chooses GPL because it's the most used licence but I forgot to read what it actually says and I'm upset"
Some of the add-ons on this site are commercial plugins available for sale by their authors. All Blender plugins have to be GPL so this sort of redistribution is legal but some of these authors have been rather upset about it. So a large argument ensued on the Blender forums about the GPL, the ethics of software redistribution even when copyright law says it is okay, etc.