Blender Is GPL

BartV writes with a low-key snippet from the new blender.org: ""Today, Sunday oct 13, 2002, we've launched the Blender sources as GNU GPL to the Internet. Blender has become Free Software forever!" This should be a case study for other companies with software no longer profitable as payware; read some of our previous postings about Blender to follow the story from idea to release.

Comments

Great!

[Pig Hogger]

Now, to those who want to "innovate" with Blender, we can say:

Bite my shiny metal license!!!

Oh, wait, that's BLENDER!!! Darn!!!

Re:Server down for obvious reasons

[Elbereth]

Bite your tongue! Those who would trade a little freedom for a program that works deserve neither freedom nor a program that works.

Now all we need...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is some open source drink recipies!

No longer profitable as payware

[DrugCheese]

This should be a case study for other companies with software no longer profitable as payware

When will Microsoft start selling Win3.1 out to GPL?

Re:No longer profitable as payware

[An Onerous Coward]

Here's the timeline:

January 1 - Microsoft announces that they will open source Windows 3.1 and DOS 6.22 for the paltry sum of $50,000. Apparently, this is to make up for the money Bill Gates lost when he ran his wallet through the laundry.

February 12 - "The Freedows Project" (sounds like "Fritos") obtains the required $50,000 through generous donations by individuals and random muggings.

February 13 - Microsoft turns over the source code.

February 14 - The Freedows project sues Microsoft for violating the GPL by deliberately obscuring their code. Microsoft counters by explaining that, no, that's the code they really were using. They enter as evidence fifty pages of source code for IE 7.

March 22 - Freedows announces that they've overcome the first project hurdle: Separating out the integrated Solitare code from the rest of the OS.

March 25 - Freedows is forked, and a new project called XFreedows emerges.

March 27 - Freedows forks again after an SMP patch is rejected. The new project is called "Lindows."

March 28 - Lindows is sued by Lindows.

April 1 - Freedows announces that Freedows OS is now running on top of the Linux kernel. Nobody believes them.

April 2, 3, 4, and 5 - Freedows resends the press releases, publishes all sorts of screenshots and demos, bribes CmdrTaco to publish a, "No it wasn't an April Fools Joke" story. Freedows is slashdotted, detonating three servers and killing five. The project is set back a month.

May 15 - A seven day flame war erupts when someone on the Freedows mailing list suggests changing the UI to require "triple clicking" for some functions.

June 1 - XFreedows is integrated back into the Freedows main branch, adding native NVIDIA support, an OpenGL-based 3D GUI, 16-way SMP support, the XFAT file system (a relational database filesystem which supports file sizes up to 300 petabytes and transparent compression), full 32 bit, 64 bit, and 128 bit support, and DRM support that can be disabled with a couple of IFDEFs.

July 15 - IBM "donates" ten million dollars to the Freedows project in what can only be described as a corporate mugging.

August 5 - Solitare is re-integrated into the OS, improving performance 300-fold.

August 7 - Thanks to IBM's generous donation, Freedows can move its CVS server onto a ludicrously powerful server running the Freedows OS.

August 29th - 2:14 a.m. Freedows becomes self-aware.

Re:FYI...

[Theom]

Not if it lets people who KNOW HOW TO USE IT...

Hey Clippy, we finaly found someone who likes you.

Re:So how's the codebase?

[Tablizer]

Was it "worth it"? I don't know the first thing about blender or very much about this buy-out. Was the source available prior to the buy-out so that it could be inspectad/evaluated?

If the code is anything like the UI, then "it is great after you get used to it in a few years." :-P