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?"

Comments

How about BeOS?

[FyRE666]

I know, it'll never happen... but if it could be bought in this way it'd save a lot of projects a lot of time ;-)

Re:How about BeOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Quoting the slashdot article:
...what other non-profitable commercial software might we buy cheap and make Open Source?

So this is how we moderate?

Buy Microsoft Windows = Funny
Buy BeOS = Offtopic

Xeno's Paradox

[Speare]

One data point may be encouraging, but it's not particularly useful. People gripe about the ludicrous nature of the prefix, "If this trend continues,". Well, if frogs had wings, they wouldn't bump their ass a-hoppin'.

Will the donations per day be constant? Linear? Exponentially increasing? Exponentially decaying? Will the total accumulated funds follow Xeno's paradox?

Tell us a better story next week.

Too Good To Be True

[Anonymous Coward]

While this sounds great and it would be cool if we could extend the idea to start buying other commercial software and open source it, it isn't as easy as it sounds.

Say we got enough cash to buy product X and did, product X might depend on a source licence for product Y, we couldn't open source X then with out buy Y also.

Y will probably depend on things like W and Z...

Just my imediate reaction -
Jon

I hope this doesn't succede too well

[MBCook]

If this succedes too well, it could start a dangerous prescident. Now I like blender, and I hope they open source it, but I hope that companies don't get the idea that this is an easy way to make a quick buck off software you don't want to deal with any more. For example I'd love to see Windows 3.1 (or even 1.0) opensourced, or other software that no money is made on any more (like Mac OS 7). And I wouldn't mind if MS or Apple did that and said "Look, we'll open it up, GPL, do whatever you want with it, but pay us $5k." But I think we can all agree that while it'd be nice to have alot of old software opened up, we shouldn't have to rase $100,000 to do it for each piece of software (assuming 1 euro == 1 USD like it did a few days ago). Now blender is all that company made correct? And they went out of business and they saw this as a way to pay off their debts right? In this curcumstance, I can see them doing this and asking for so much, but let's not start a president.

PS: If I'm wrong about the circumstances of this, my point is still intact. I wanna see the windows source code, but not if I have to help pay $100,000. ID software has the right idea. Open it up, but say you can't make money off it.

Re:I hope this doesn't succede too well

[GigsVT]

I agree, and I just donated $5 US. I don't really care about Blender, but I know how much it means to other people, and how much it means for Linux. So I'll eat a cheap lunch tomorrow to make up for it, big deal.

If every Slashdotter that cared about Open Source does as I did, and eats beans and rice for lunch tomorrow, then they will hit their $100,000 goal by the end of the day today. We can make it happen.

Re:I hope this doesn't succede too well

[johnnyb]

If this succedes too well, it could start a dangerous prescident.

*******

Paying for software is not dangerous.

******

but I hope that companies don't get the idea that this is an easy way to make a quick buck off software you don't want to deal with any more.

******

I hope they do get that idea. I would be willing to pitch in money to free up several software packages that vendors probably don't care much about. Free is about Freedom, not price.

Possible issues.

[danamania]

I don't want to sound like a bearer of bad news - and I'm not, just noting an issue that could prevent some projects (given an ideal world where the opensource community can run around buying old software) from being fully usable as open source. One of these affects what would otherwise be a free download from Apple - Mac OS 7.1, and Apple QuickTake driver software.

6.0.8, 7.0 and 7.5.3 are free downloads, but apparently 7.1 isn't, as Apple only licensed, but doesn't -own- the patents to some technologies included, but which were later not used. Similarly, it's apparently Fuji who own the patents to parts of the QuickTake software - meaning ftp.apple.com has an excellent library of older downloadable software, with a few notable exceptions.

Of course - if ten thousand people buy the source to something really fantastic that does contain a few patented bits, it's still a good thing... there's the ability to write-out what can't be freely distributed, and re-write parts that can.

(take all of this post with a grain of salt - I could be full of it)
a grrl & her server

Eldred vs. Ashcroft

[Rayonic]

Well, if this case succeeds, we might be seeing the first programs fall into the public domain since... well, ever. Correct me if I'm wrong, but has any piece of software ever fallen into the public domain unless specifically put there? It's a damn shame, now that I think about it.

So to heck with buying programs out of copyright prison. Eldred has the right idea in attacking the root of the problem - insanely long copyright extensions! (Of course, that won't necessarily free the code...)

Re:Pay Open Source Programmers Instead

[pajor]

Strategy. Free Software needs a 3d modeler. With Maya seats costing 3k, and the massive amount of money in the Effects Industry, a Free Software solution could gain significant momentum. Projects like Film Gimp have benefitted from programmers under the payroll of such effects houses as Rhythm and Hues, and ILM has been interested in helping with development.

Effect houses create a lot of great software which is used in house only, providing them with a base like blender under the GPL will intice them to use those programmers for projects which are released to the public and thus helping everyone.

If 2.5 million dollars was put into a project, and we can buy it for 100k, and we can make it Free Software, why start from scratch?

Re:BeOS?

[Jeremi]

Perhaps with enough of a fund we might be able to get BeOS source released! Granted, it would likely have to be a much bigger fund than 100,000 euros, but I'd be willing to wager that there are more people interested in BeOS than in Blender, nifty though Blender is

When the BeUnited people asked about this, Palm quoted them a price of two million dollars US. Personally, I think if you want open-source BeOS, you might as well support the OpenBeOS project instead. It is coming along nicely.