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Blender Fund Raises EUR18,000 In Three Days
dpm writes:"The Blender foundation looks like it might actually have a chance of raising the EUR 100,000 it needs to buy Blender from the NaN shareholders and make it Open Source. They started fundraising on Thursday, and they already have total pledges of EUR 18,025, with EUR 9,946 actually collected. See the money meter for the current status. If this actually works, what other non-profitable commercial software might we buy cheap and make Open Source? Old video games? Video editing software?"
The investors are 2,5 million us $ short of having a profit in this.
If they get 100K $ then they will be 2,4 million US $ short of having a profit.
Uh, the GPL is the reason that "derivations with Blender codes" can only be used in "other GPLed software projects".
In other words this is merely paraphrasing the GPL. If Blender is GPL, then Blender derivatives are GPL.
This is 100% GNU GPL.
Xeno's paradox basically describes a situation where you can travel an infinate distance closer to a point, by halving your distance to it in each step, but you'd never actually reach the target. Kind of like the fractal with an infinite perimeter, but can be totally enclosed by a circle of finite perimeter.
Blarg
"Id Software releases it's old and not-so-profitable-anymore source code, and I'm not seeing a single great thing being created with any of it, and as most would agree, Id's products are top notch. So I don't see how greatness can come from buying anyone else's old code."
NaN's situation is not similar to Id Software's. Blender was originally released as binary-only freeware well before NaN existed. It was Neo-Geo's in-house software and was release as a matter of goodwill. Later on, the developers behind Blender formed NaN to sell Blender-related paraphenalia, like manuals, T-shirts, tutorials, keys to unlock special features of Blender, and some other things. The business didn't work out so well, so NaN went bankrupt, leaving Blender about to go onto the old bit-bucket of history.
What the fund raising campaign is trying to do is keep Blender going, not to buy of someone's old and unused assets.
This is sort of a long post, and it's nowhere as well structured as it possibly should have been. So if you're not interested in reading about the promotion of democracy and free speech via the Internet, then by all means skip it, but if you do read it all the way through then I think that you will not only find it on-topic as to the article in question, but also to the general slashdotian sense of freedom and the individual's rights.
I could see several points in having a video editing system (complete with sound/dialogue editing and minor FX-functionality) open sourced.
Although I personally own and use licensed copies for all the programs that I use professionally as a film-maker, many of the people from 3:rd world countries that I've worked with have had problems in acquiring such software because of its high cost. And yes, there is always the opportunity to pull down a cracked version from the Internet. But as this is illegal and manufacturers of editing suites generally check that you have a licensed copy of their program after you've released a commercial production (or at least a widely distributed production with your name on it), this becomes a less attractive option.
As you all know, there are millions of people that live under such circumstances that they don't have the privilege of free speech and free elections. One of the big reasons that their situation doesn't change is because of the fact that they have no way of showing it to the rest of the world. Yes, there are documentaries about the horrors that occur everyday in underprivileged countries and CNN shows you thousands upon thousands of pictures every year of a world in flames. However, these documentaries and news-flashes, although possibly well meant, all have one major flaw in common: They are not made by the people that should be telling the story.
The majority of them are produced by, and therefore politically colored by, western media corporations. I'm not trying to say that all such institutions are evil and this is not an anti-corporate post. I am saying though, that such producers generally have the same ultimate goal, which is, as you all know, to make money. Nothing wrong with that, I work hard at doing that myself. But, in the nature of media money-making lies an inherent factor that prevents an actual change in the countries at hand from taking place. And that is the "hot-news" factor. After a couple of days, news about some small civil war or an oppressive dictatorship in a state, that has a name you can't even pronounce, decreases in commercial value. And so the focus of the media-corporation changes and the all that is left of the civil war is a couple of page 9 articles that state some ridiculously high death-toll, in a place that you can vaguely remember hearing about. And yes, I too remember the media-coverage of former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan and so on, and the media-hype there definitely helped bring about a definite change. But these places only make up a tiny portion of all the horrible things that happen.
The people that should be telling the story (namely the people living in the countries in question), so that a more accurate and consistent picture is projected upon the rest of world, simply haven't got the means to do so. And although an open-source video-editing system would only be a small step on a long road, it would without a doubt make a difference. It doesn't need to have all the functionalities of a fully fleshed out editing suite (you'd have a hard time finding machines that could run one in those countries anyway). It only needs to be able to cut sound and dialogue (in an easyily understandable way) so that the native-filmmaker in question can get all the fundamentals of the production right, and then the people with the funky gear (like myself) can prepare it for distribution on the quality-demanding networks of the western world. In fact, if it was open-sourced and by the community made to run on a cheap machine using an open-source O.S, then all the better. Old editing suites that nobody uses anymore (and because of this are cheap to buy) can seldom run on a free O.S.
If you did read this far then thanks for listening. I hope you don't feel that I wasted your time.
-any creative production that doesn't leave you with a bleeding ulcer is solely due to lack of determintation-
Several similar paradoxes are attributed to Zeno. The most common example is that of the fast Achilles chasing a slow turtle in an infinite race. The turtle is given a head start but Achilles is never able to catch up (or pass) as long as the turtle continues to move forward. His reasoning is that by the time Achilles reaches any point that the turtle has already been, the turtle itself has moved slightly further ahead. By the time Achilles then reaches this new position, he is closer to the turtle, but again, the turtle has moved forward to a new position. As long as you follow this logic, the gap is quickly diminished, but can never actually close.
I think his original point was to demonstrate that motion does not actually exist, and further, since we can actually observe a man passing a turtle, our perception is not the same as the logical underlying reality. Today, his paradox is often used to make the opposite argument when introducing the concepts of infinity and limits in Calculus.
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
This might have gone over a lot better if the submission even hinted at what Blender is. I went to the page, and all it talked about was the fundraising project, and nary a word about what Blender does. After a while, I got bored and left.