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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?"
A lot of commercial software likely is using libraries/code licensed from 3rd parties making opening up the code (or selling it) extremely unlikely.
or, even better, games with great concepts that crash all the bloody time. Two come to mind; Alien Legacy and Septerra Core are wonderful games. If only they were useable.
One of the things I like best about open source is the fact that crash bugs get fixed quickly. While it's sometimes a pain to debug little UI bugs, the simplicity of just gdb'ing into a core in *NIX is heavenly compared to Microsoft's debugging solution.
Who wouldn't love a rock-solid game engine, running a great storyline, compiled specifically for their box's specs?
Jouster
WordPerfect, absolutely (currently owned by Corel); and possibly Envoy as well (currently owned by Novell, who decided to kill). In the case of Envoy, it would be enough to see its specifications published, so that anyone could write coders and decoders (just like for PDF).
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
Unfortunately, my finances are tight, so I could only give $10. Wah.
OTOH, if all the Slashdotters did the same (Hint! Big Hint! HINT!), the Blender sources could go GPL in a matter of days.
Yes, I am shamelessly trying to get you all to contribute, not only to compensate for my lack of funds, but to help keep a worthy, though ideosyncratic, piece of software from becoming part of the bit bucket of history.
Remember, if Blender isn't freed, it will be left stuck as binary-only software that will never be upgraded, subject to becoming unrunnable as our computers change and evolve.
Please contribute to the free Blender fund!
(HINT! HINT! HINT!)
"Buying" and open-sourcing some software that can do circuit schematics and PCB layout would actually be nice. Yes, I know about gEDA project, and they actually have a nice schematic editor and a pretty decent Gerber file viewer, but the board layout program hasn't even been started yet, or so it seems. And I don't feel like reinventing the wheel and writing all these auto-routing routines, etc. from scratch.
Bush Lies Watch
If this succedes too well, it could start a dangerous prescident.
Yeah, it might create a market and jobs.
they saw this as a way to pay off their debts right?
The horror!
Open it up, but say you can't make money off it.
Yeah. Let's all keep our minimum-wage jobs at McCompany. We certainly wouldn't want software to have any *value* or anything, because, well, that might mean someone, somewhere might be making *money* and well, that would mean more jobs, and well, that's just not acceptable.
(Yes, this is exactly what it sounds like)
As usual, an open source drone has spouted business advice that has no relationship to the real world.
They can't give it away for free. It has value. There are investors who paid hard cash for the development of the code and while they now know that they're not going to get it all back, they'd like to recoup some of their costs at least.
Frankly, I suspect they could get more for it in the private market. If anything, they're doing the OS movement a favor by offering it at a discount.
Want public companies to give away their old source? You realize that doing so would result in them being sued by shareholders, right? The principal officers of a company have a legal obligation to the shareholders to maximize stock value. Giving away IP which has value (and if you think it doesn't, then why do you want to look at it in the first place? The mere fact that you have an interest in doing so and building on it indicates that there is indeed value associated with it, regardless of its age) is contrary to that legal requirement and would result in the board being ousted, fined, and jailed.
Private companies are another matter. If they have investors (as NaN did), then the investors would probably like some of their money back. If they don't, well, then they're free to do whatever. I do admire how id Software does business - and frankly, they're very shrewd about it. Open sourcing their old engines not only helps the OSS community, but it also pretty much kills the old engine dead commercially. Yes, you can still license it (for only $10k too, compared to $1M+ previously), but the odds of your client being hacked and cheaters ruining the game is way higher. And the original game becomes pretty much unplayable online except amongst friends - again, cheaters have a free hand with the client once it's open sourced.
I like open source software, and it has its place, but it's not the be-all and end-all of software development, no matter what RMS and his cronies may believe. And whenever I see people spouting bogus information that goes against basic business fundamentals it just shows again and again why open source and Linux in particular continue to have problems becoming mainstream.
My understanding was that they already pitched it to the private market and got no takers. This meant that in essence they were going to sit on it until someone made an offer which Ton did. While it might not have been the most lucrative offer it did open up the possibility of future returns to the shareholders above and beyond the initial 100,000 and a way for the company to come back.
While we assume that investors always make smart choices I think we can see from other investments *cough*AOL*cough*T/W*cough* that they don't. Often investors pull out just at the moment a company starts pulling it together or keep throwing money into a company that's gasping it's last breath.
Now there are some savy VC's out there but they usually know when to put more in and when to cut their losses. Other VC's would rather sit on something worth a little, holding out for the big payoff, and in the end getting nothing.
The Blender community has been begging for as long as I know to open source the software not so that it will be free but so that they can contribute to making it better. There are people there willing to put time and effort into the product for free because they love the product and most are more than willing to then see that product sold commercially to fund further success. Open source and commercial success are not necessarily seperate goals.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
As usual, an open source drone has spouted business advice that has no relationship to the real world.
... I have no idea how 100k euro stacks up against their initial investment) and the community benefits from one of the finest 3d animation products becoming Free Software.
... so while I agree with much of your critique of the original post (and have my own disagreements with the premise that great success in this funding drive would somehow harm the future of free software...quite the contrary I think), I would ask you to be careful in painting such broad, and inaccurate, stereotypes.
This guy isn't any more representative of Open Source or Free Software than John Walker "Taliban" Lindh is of America.
Using your disagreement with him to paint all free software and open source enthusiasts with the same broad brush is disingenious and inaccurate.
I for one donated $100 to Blender because (a) I use the program and would have paid that for a commercial product (except that I will never again store data in a proprietary format beholden to a closed source product because my data is what is really valuable, much more so than the software I'm running) and (b) it is a fair deal: the investors get some of their money back (or perhaps make some money
My problem with proprietary software isn't that they make money on it. Hell, I've bought 8 or 9 ports of various Wintel games for GNU/Linux, I paid for a MainActor license back before kino did the job I needed, and I even antied up for Applix back in the pre Open Office days. My problem is the vulnerability of having a vendor stand between me and my valuable data, leaving me vulnerable to orphanage (as happened with Blender initially), forced updates (Windows Word, and other programs too numerous to mention), or insurmountable incompatabilities that make using my data on the hardware and software of my choice difficult or perhaps even impossible.
Business models that do not affect me in this manner, such as Red Hat's approach, are very compatible with my software requirements (both at home and at work). Those that leave me (or my employer) vulnerable are, at most, stopgap measures until I find something more free (as in freedom) that doesn't leave me so vulnerable.
The thing is, there are viable business models that are compatible with Free Software and do not require leaving the customer in the awkward situation I described (and most Blender folks find themselves at the moment). Ghostscript, among others, use one approach (there are others): namely to release a product in a non-free manner and charge for it (sometimes for just commercial use, sometimes in general), but with a clause that releases the code under a Free License (like the GPL, if they don't want their competitors to use it against them, or BSD if they don't care and just want it to be free) after a period of time (say, a year or so).
Most people will gladly pay a little money to have the current version of something, rather than waiting 6 months or a year, but no one likes buying something only to have its value go to zero as bitrot sets in. Knowing the source to today's version of SomeCommericalApp is available, and will be legally freed under a free license a year from now, protects me as the customer against nearly every vulnerability a proprietary product imposes, without costing the software manufacturer their edge in marketing and selling the product today.
Especially with today's software, where something a year out of date is selling for $5 in the bargain bins anyway, this is really a reasonable approach.
I probably qualify as a more ardent advocate of Free Software than most, and even I fall far short of the ad homonim brush you paint Open Source and Free Software advocates with
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy