Steam-powered Blender

Re:Steam-powered Blender by reedlaw on Wednesday August 14, 2013 @11:13PM (#6215957)

I wouldn't say in this case that the problem lies with Blender's choice of the GPL, but rather with Autodesk's FBX license. The FBX license is much more restrictive and onerous than the GPL. Whether GPL is freer than BSD-style licenses or not is debatable, but it certainly respects the user's freedom far more than Autodesk's "Evaluation License" with "Permitted Number equal to one".

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Re:Steam-powered Blender by comex on Thursday August 15, 2013 @01:24AM (#6216314)

Yeah. "Releasing" a file format as a restrictive binary SDK rather than actually documenting the format is a really weird and aggressive thing to do, and is very much Autodesk's fault rather than Blender's, even if you ignore the issues with platforms for which the binary might not be available.

On the other hand, the format does not appear to actually be that complicated, so integrating the SDK probably wouldn't save that much programming time compared to just reimplementing it.

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Re:Steam-powered Blender by forrestthewoods on Thursday August 15, 2013 @02:00AM (#6216377)

Blame whichever license you want. It doesn't matter.

Let's say it is Autodesk's fault and they don't care. Now what? Blender is the tool that's a pain in the ass to use so the onus is on them to make their tool not suck. Meanwhile the rest of the world will continue to use FBX because it's an awesome format to work with.

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Re:Steam-powered Blender by StavrosK on Thursday August 15, 2013 @07:28AM (#6217157)

"Blame the gun or the guy who died for not having a steel skeleton, it doesn't matter. The guy is the one who's dead, the gun is fine. The onus is on guys to not die."

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Re:Steam-powered Blender by andrewflnr on Thursday August 15, 2013 @09:32AM (#6217624)

If we're going to make this analogy work, the guy who died could have easily worn a bullet-proof vest or avoided getting in the fight at all.

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Re:Steam-powered Blender by if_by_whisky on Thursday August 15, 2013 @11:22AM (#6218344)

Or he could have picked a different software license.

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Re:Steam-powered Blender by k__ on Thursday August 15, 2013 @04:43AM (#6216754)

lol

You are the one who was all "GPL hurtz dem users!!"

You're probably right with your assumption that FBX is awesome, but this wasn't part of the debate.

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Re:Steam-powered Blender by indrax on Friday August 16, 2013 @01:07AM (#6222268)

What does "awesome format to work with" mean? You're not working with the format.

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Re:Steam-powered Blender by AdrianRossouw on Wednesday August 14, 2013 @11:49PM (#6216048)

even LGPL would have been preferable.

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Re:Steam-powered Blender by drdaeman on Thursday August 15, 2013 @04:04AM (#6216650)

Oh, and licenseless download-and-"what license?"-type warez seems to be the most wholeheartedly welcomed option with the general crowd.

Free Software's there for a reason. Let's not forget that. And if we stick to that (i.e. not trade freedom to whatever feels comfortable at the moment), there's a good reason to not use LGPL instead of GPL: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html

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