Slashdot Mirror
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.
While I was poking around on www.blender3d.com yesterday, I clicked through one of the Links/Sponsors and found some fairly cool things.
The site is http://www.quelsolaar.com/ with 2 projects based on blender (I think, but they might not be) at http://www.quelsolaar.com/loqairou/screens.html and http://www.quelsolaar.com/quelsolaar/screens.html (a 3rd project lacks screenshots, but is a new experimental interface for blender, it says)
Some really cool stuff, coming real soon.
fair.org counterpunch.com truthout.com indymedia.org salon.com
eff.org guerrilla.net debian.org gentoo.org
"Actually since this is such an anticipated release, I think the site was hammered before the article was finished submitting."
It was. I checked it this morning. Imagine, being slashdotted without assistance from slashdot.org ! The horrors! What [other] force in the universe is capable of such obliterative power?
fair.org counterpunch.com truthout.com indymedia.org salon.com
eff.org guerrilla.net debian.org gentoo.org
Just so you know, any GUI that needs people to "get used to it" is bad design and doesn't take into consideration human factors and usability.
Not really. It's only bad design if your goal is to make the program as easy to learn as possible. In the case of Blender, it means that it's a UI optimized so that those who know it can work as fast as possible. Those optimizations may be inconsistent with optimizations that allow somebody to learn it as fast as possible.
The ideal UI would do both. Given where Blender comes from, the "skilled user efficiency" optimizations were far more important. I suspect there will be a lot of resistance to decreasing the efficiency of the UI to skilled users in the name of improving it for newcomers. If the latter can be done without sacrificing the former, then that will be welcome.
-Rob
w00t!
:-)
o ur ce-2.25b.tar.gz
Blessed are the sourcemakers.
ftp://dl.xs4all.nl/pub/mirror/blender/blender-s
fair.org counterpunch.com truthout.com indymedia.org salon.com
eff.org guerrilla.net debian.org gentoo.org
As I understood it, the code can be used in two forms: 1) Use it under the terms of GPL, in which case if you distribute a modified version, code must be included, or 2) negotiate the license to distribute only the binaries with the Foundation, and pay them to fund the development (and I expect this payment is not that light!).
I fail to see how this "stifles a major part of the GPL". The Blender Foundation releases all of their code under this dual license - People donate them money to do their job and release code under these terms. This license does allow others to take this code and modify it, and choose to either pay up, or be a nice citizen and contribute the code.
And yes, this dual license thing was mentioned a couple of times in past. Loudly. Were you not listening?
Actually, I've never seen a 3D modeling program that didn't expect a three-button mouse (I'm an engineer, not an artist BTW, although many 3D programs use the same engines). I don't think making some "shortcut" functions (zoom, rotate, pan, etc) work with the middle mouse button is bad design, it works very well for me; but even that were the case it's still an industry standard.