Slashdot Mirror
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?"
...by selling it to geeks like us, then is it really "unprofitable" software? I'd say that would just be the final way to squeeze money (profit) out of a dead product: sell it to the geeks.
Microsoft Windows maybe? ;)
...it might actually have a chance of raising the EUR 100,000 it needs to buy Blender from the NaN shareholders...
Of course, if they fail to raise the full amount, they may have to settle for a less expensive one from KitchenAid.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
What about Windows? We could buy try and buy that one out. What do y'all think?
-Peapod
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 ;-)
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
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.
[
I don't know if trying to open source old games is such a great idea...I don't think it would really help anything.
It would be nice to see some music editing software (like a multi-track editor/recorder/mixer) that's closed source go open source...ooh, who wouldn't want an open source version of Cakewalk? Or Logic?
I'm salivating at the thought.
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)
I was just wondering if I were to pitch in 50 dollars or so, would I be able to get a tax deduction on it?
Sorry, but my understanding of the tax laws (in the US) is very limited, any help would be greatly appreciated!!
Sunny
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/05/202321 6&mode=nested&tid=126 ;)=
often works better than the 'named' url in the article...
https http.
werked for me.
Other products to buy and make opensource?
Does AYBABTU say anything to you?
MOVE ZIG!
c0w goes moo.
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
Does anybody know what the chances that something like this might be possible in BeOS's future? From what I know, Palm doesn't seem to be actually using the BeOS technology; rather, they bought the company for the engineers.
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.
This might be our last chance to save BeOS. If anyone has any information about Palm's plans, please say so.
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.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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
I read it as Bender Fund Raises EUR18,000... Like they were trying to save Futurama or something.
I'll go back to my cave now.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
Why not use all the money to pay and help out those that already give to the OSS community? Give some money to KDE/Gnome or whom ever made your desktop. Larry and the other Perl makers are running out o cash, why not give them more?
Don't encourage those who make crappy commercial stuff!!!!
Did you just give that poor site the slashdot-click-o-death only to see:
:-)
|_| 100,000
|_| 90,000
|_| 80,000
|_| 70,000
|_| 60,000
|_| 50,000
|_| 40,000
|_| 30,000
|x| 20,000
|x| 10,000
I though real geeks were immune to graphics
No sig to see here. Move along.
Slightly offtopic, but mods - please hang in there...
I've never had the chance to use blender, but old console games, especially SNES games, really deserve this treatment.
For example, Yu Yu Hakusho, a surprisingly good Anime, is on Cartoon Network right now. I was browsing a ROM site for a ROM of a game I bought, when I noticed that there were not one or two, but 4 YYH SNES games and a bunch of Game Boy games. Now, in this example, Funimation may own the rights to these games in the US, but they aren't using those rights.
This could do many things. For old developers that have gone out of business, SOMEONE still owns rights to games that may already even be in English. These people aren't likely going to see any money, but if we could raise a small amount they may be willing to sell the rights to them.
There are quite a few PC games that fall under this category too. The copyright holders of One Must Fall 2097 gave their work to the public domain a while back. One of the Ultima games was distributed with a magazine freely. I, personally, would love to be able to download games like Jazz Jackrabbit and the like freely and legally.
This needs to be done. There are many great games and old apps that deserve this treatment.
That said, raising less than 20% of what's needed for this buyout is depressing, as it's pretty safe to say that donations will slow down a bit.
In about three days, they raised $35,000 for the website, and had over three million ad impressions registered.
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!)
Um.... why not just buy out blender with the fake Euros?
For crying out loud, it would take much more than a 100,000 euros to reduce the Euro's value that much.
Heck, you'd have to print a 100,000 Euros worth of Euros! Where will you get the money for that? Wait, we can counterfeit Euros --- AAGH! MY EYES!!!
publishing the full Blender sources, including old and new development, under the GNU GPL license ... the Foundation has to pay in advance a one time fee of 100k euro for this (100k USD).
Ok. Who is the foundation, where are it's organizing papers? Who is on its board, etc.
the Foundation can offer an additional commercial non-copylefted (BSD style) license for companies to integrate with non-GPL projects.
Ohhh. This comes out of nowhere. Where is the proposed agreement with NaN? Does NaN get a cut of this money? Who sets the prices for this non-GPL licensing? Where does the money go? Who funds the access to non-GPL, is this part of the 100K?
I don't know about you; but I'm skeptical. This is alot of money, and it's a bit short on details.
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...)
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
this piece of news is talking about euros? so why not using the euro symbol which is and not that crappy "EUR"? just type 10000 or 10000 (But... Maybe the "" character doesn't display well here?)
"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
They can do that. If you dont want them to do that then just fork the code.
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.
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.
My blog can kick your blog's ass
Nah, I wouldn't care if it took $100,000 to get a product like HP OpenMail open sourced. At least we'd have the option to use it and build upon it, unlike now.
I AM A MORON. Seriously. I completely and totally misread that. Mod my comment down before some stupid freak actually believes what I said
Umm according to this at the very least a full third of the money raised will go to the FSF if they don't hit the 100k mark. And NaN has already agreed to sell it under contract if the money can be raised. So stop spreading the FUD and code.
Gnuyen
6. Move to a country where you can play with computers in prison.
FRA: STFU GTFO
The Alphora Dataphor DAE is the first relational database management system since IBM BS12 and the QUEL version of Postgres.
It was coded for MS .Net, thus it should be readily portable to Ximian Mono or GNUs & Southern Storms DotGNU Portable.Net.
If such a potentially useful software became publicized and free software, we could have a really innovating no Marketspeak intended , probably killer application the proprietary vendors would have a hard time scrambling after.
And that with unreprochable theoretical foundations attested by the luminars of the field.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Aaaugh! You managed to misspell 'precedent' two different ways in your post. This would be acceptable from one whose native language is not English. However, your website indicates otherwise. You should really read what you have written before you hit that 'submit' button. While a few typos here and there can be overlooked, posts containing more than a few misspelled words tend to make their writers look uneducated.
The 100,000 euro is to pay for the intellecual property so it may be freed. The code is currently the property of investors, and 100,000 is the price to make them go away.
Actually, to be pedantic, 100,000.00 would be $100,910.00 according to http://www.xe.com/
Yes, I've looked at the clones, and yes, they suck. We need M.U.L.E. All of it. Especially the music. Best party game of all time.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
5. NaN Holding will be sufficiently enabled to (re)start business in the future, for example licensing derived technology or by offering professional services.
This looks like a spanner in the works, if Blender is relased under the full GPL, NaN will not be able to license derived technology except under the GPL.
Or are they talking about something not related to the codebase? Like creating a patent on how blender does something?
Then there is prioir art. In any case, point 5 looks strange to me but IANAL.
Example : When rebel.com folded the trustees wanted 12+ Million for the design, etc.. a year later they sold it for 200K CAD. There's alot of cool technology out there to be bought
"Be glad you sailed for a better day, But dont forget there will be hell to pay" - Dave King/Flogging Molly
I doubt it, because I doubt that this is NaN's money- the money belongs to a non-profit foundation.
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
Buy me off? You can bite my shiny metal ass!!!
I just made a decent donation to their cause and feel good about doing it. I've used so much open source software that I feel the need to give back or give the gift of something becoming open source. Try to help them out. Even if you don't use blender, give them money as if you were giving money to the entire open source community.
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-
The first $100K, if I understand correctly, is going to the investment company that put up a substantial amount of capital to fund Blender's development. Without it, the only other option was to start writing a eulogy for Blender's untimely demise.
What's the power of the Slashdot effect? Can we make s significant impact by raising the money to make this fabulous software available for free? It would set a high bar for the quality of all 3d software. Blender would be the base measure -- if you've got 3d software you wanna sell, it's gotta be better than Blender, 'cos that's free.
This is a great opportunity for Slashdot to show what it can do. I just made my $50 donation. Let's make it happen.
If you own the copyright, you can license anything however you want. Once code is GPL'd it can never be unGPL'd, but you can then take a copy of that code and release it under whatever other license you want, with whatever restrictions.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
What is that famous Blender?
What does it do? Why is it great?
Nobody bothered to tell it from the main story - for
clueless people...
PGP comes to mind. And I'm sure Zimmerman would be all for that if the opportunity presented itself, so long as NAI is still interested in selling it.
A standards based calendar server is really needed.
Something that resembles MS Exchange or similar products.
Bynari has something going, but the product is proprietary, built with OSS. It's a bit flaky, too.
This could be an inroad to the desktop market, having a collaboration solution, that is easier to setup and perhaps maintain than a MTA+LDAP+SQLdb+whatever it takes to create something like Exchange.
Best regards,
Steen Suder
-- for email: send to
I fear those things alone will cost Microsoft more than $5k, maybe nearly $100k.
http://www.savekaryn.com/
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
Alright everyone who visited the Blender3d site just now fork over a buck to the FreeBlenderFund!
If everyone did that (as I am sure everyone did), I am willing to bet that the fund would be way over 100K Euros, way over...
My buck is on its way...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Will the donations per day be constant? Linear? Exponentially increasing? Exponentially decaying?
The growth of a population, such as the spread of a computer worm, typically follows a "logistic growth" curve, that is, starting out with roughly exponential growth and ending up with exponential decay of the rate at which new infections occur as the worm reaches "carrying capacity". A worm begins to reach carrying capacity as the number of vulnerable uninfected hosts dies down. See more about the growth rate of a worm population in this article about Warhol Worms by Nicholas C Weaver.
In the case of a pledge drive, exponential growth comes from word of mouth spread, and Slashdot seems to provide a strong burst in the population of donors. As of this writing, 20854 has been pledged, and the Blender Foundation has collected 11775 of that. The big question in this case is whether the carrying capacity measured in donor contributions exceeds $100,000.
Will I retire or break 10K?
A lot of commercial software likely is using libraries/code licensed from 3rd parties making opening up the code (or selling it) extremely unlikely.
id Software's Doom was originally opened without sound code because it had used the proprietary MIDAS library. The developers of Doom Legacy filled in the gap with the Allegro cross-platform multimedia programming library (similar to SDL).
Or they could do as sybase did when it opened Watcom C++: first open it to previous owners, with a build that requires the DLLs already included with the compiler, then after you rewrite everything you don't own, release source code to the general public so that they can bootstrap the compiler.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Please god someone get the code to Ultima Online 2, it was a great project that was abandoned, and it would be great if people could finish it out just for small server use even. Unforuntunatly, I don't even know if the code still exists or if EA trashed the whole thing. I know they killed most of the paper records of it.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Think of mozilla. The team had the netscape source, but they shucked it in favor of a rewrite.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
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
How about Microsoft? Sure, it would take ten million of us several hundred thousand a piece but damn wouldnt that be nice? Even just getting someone onto the board...
Question
http://www.ironfroggy.com/
Unfortunately, while I think it would be great for BeOS to rise up from the bitbucket, the fact of the matter is many of us who owned licenses for the operating system felt like we were "donating" since R3. My cd sets date from DP2 to 5Pro, and driver support for a lot of things was still DIY in that final version.
I'll miss it, and the promise of the insanely fast, streamlined media server on even average hardware, but for me the "batmobile"(to quote Neal Stephenson) has been mothballed. After I get my next job, I'm going to buy a Mac (something I've wanted since I saw the first one in junior high school, but could never afford) and pin my hopes on OSX's BSD kernel keeping developers interested.
Get off my launchpad!
Yep. They dangled the bait infront of you, and you bit it. Oh, and just for the record, no, I didn't do it.
What? Me? Worry?
Didn't kuro5hin.org have a fund raiser a month or 2 ago? I thought they met their goals
What? Me? Worry?
Well maybe Open source fans and companies could fund the campaign of a few senators. If Disney or Exxon can get "custom made" laws passed in return for their "generous contribution" we can do the same. It's been a long time that US politicians are sold to the highest bidder...
Huh, huh, you said "anal".
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
Except one little problem: Euros are not dollars and extremely hard to counterfeit. It would be a lot easier for flood the US money supply, but that wouldnt help us. (Yes, that is why Euro bills are extremly ugly, that's the price for being anti-counterfeitable)
I guess they will pull a Trolltech/Qt trick.
It would be a lot cooler if we could LGP it, but I guess that would cost a lot more.
Why don't they also give the number of a bank account we can deposit money on ? I want to donate some money, but I'm not gonna put my money on internet in any way, not visa and not paypal.
What about if product X were sold as proprietary software, with 10% of the purchase price set aside for a 'freeness fund'. When the fund reaches a certain amount, the software is freed. I don't suggest this as a way of maximizing profits but as a way for programmers to make money but still have a useful free package after a few years. (A little bit like Ghostscript.)
As a user, this would be very attractive. Not necessarily for altruistic reasons, because I want to make a 10% 'donation', but because if the package is popular enough, it's certain to become free eventually. This is a big incentive to start using it even while it is proprietary.
I wouldn't want to spend my time learning package X if I thought the company would disappear in two years' time, or version 2.0 would come out with a completely sucky new interface and the old version would no longer be available, or even if it might get difficult to purchase extra copies for more computers. But if package X is almost certain to become free software during the next few years, I might be happy to pay for it now.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
...that this money is going to actually free the code?
Please bear with me, but how do we know this group isn't going to keep Blender for themselves.
This could be a ploy by everyone's favourite Evil Empire, get the Open Source crowd to pay for their acquisition of a 3D modeller. Genius!
</paranoia>
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Sounds like Blender could be a good example of why we need a mechanism such as the Digital Art Auction: www.digitalartauction.com
Here in Europe, they make power tools and garden implements. I wish I could get a blender half as good as my drill.
Let's buy it and open source it
Arrrgh! I hate game theory :-P
I beg of you here at /. to post an article about mTropolis. One of, if not the most innovative piece of software I have ever seen, bought and used, only to see it bought up and subsequently killed by Quark.
> contrary to that legal requirement and would
> result in the board being ousted, fined, and
> jailed
The officers of the company have an obligation to maxamize shareholder value (usually but not always). The board does not, the board are the owners of the company and only have an obligation to represent the interests of the shares that elected them. There are minority protections under US law, but a board member who represents OPMI (outside passive minority investors) interests could vote for this providing they saw in the interests of the OPMIs.
What you are saying sounds kind of like what Bungie did when they open-sourced Marathon 2 (the project can be found at source.bungie.org) Definitely a great game, with a great mod community.
Go. Play it. Have fun. :-)
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Remember the old BBS game Legend Of the Red Dragon? It's now owned by a company that keeps the source closed, and doesn't do very much development to it.
Since I run a very large LORD game on the net, I considered starting a fund raiser to buy LORD and commit it to open source. Not wanting to anger the current owners of LORD, since there are probably legal ways for them to shut down my game, I decided not to.
If there's anybody out there interested in donating money to purchase LORD and commit it to open source, please email me or post to my site's forum. If I get a big enough response (quite a longshot...), I might follow through with my original plans to do this.
-Nuke
There have been quite a few project management apps which have been rolled over by MS Project and a few others. Maybe one of them? We sure need one. I haven't been able to find anything I could use to remove our dependency on MS Project. All I can find for Linux or Java are projects that are alpha, beta at best, and do not have enough features to even think of replacing MS Project.
I'd love a serious 3d software package that I don't have to pay an arm and a leg for. Right now Maya and 3dsmax are the best ones I know of, there are otheres, but I know those packages really well.
...
Once they get closer to the top again I'll give more money, but if everyone pitched in some cash we could have some serious software on our hands
I think it's smart of they open up the source code it, but NOT GPL it. They need to do a license where the company ownes it in the end, but the source code is available to anyone, just nobody else except Blender can sell the a compiled version for profit...
That way if it takes off again they can have a business still and continue to make money without us having to pay $20 every 6 months to keep it going...
- "Sic 'em up, little buddy."
It's a quote from Sam and Max hit the road. Google, my dear man. Google.There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
One of my biggest irritations with Blender has been the uselessness of the Python API for interactive modelling tools.
I want to write my own modelling plugins to make specific tasks in blender (enhanced bevel, 'smooth shift') more like how they work in Lightwave, but have been held back by lack of API.
Open Sourcing Blender would quite likely see projects like Cal3D (realtime skeleltal animation) more able to take advantage of a 'real' GUI 3D modeller/animation toolkit. Similarly, projects like Crystal Space, WorldForge and other large game/engine projects will get a huge boost by being able to standardise on a single modelling/animation environment without having to reinvent the wheel.
And who knows, open sourcing blender might even get 'Undo' added to it's feature set.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
..any kitchen appliances. They do say black and decker on the side, but this is not supposed to be forever. applica inc. (http://www.applicainc.com) bought the household products line in 1998.
LinuxWorx
Spelling errors are intentional as are gramatical error
No, and I happen not to know what's that about.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin