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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.
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.
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Blender is an absolutely frosty 3D modeling/animation/rendering package.
Okay, that's about as much I can describe with words, and I'm not a poet so I can't describe it that way, either. It is slightly puzzling on the surface, but surprisingly amazing when you look at the renderings it spews out, and the time spent doing the picture.
I've been using Blender since 1.5 or something (can't remember) and it's become one of my Graphics Packages of Choice. (Linux may be slightly behind Windows on audio and video side, but on graphics side, The GIMP, ImageMagick and Blender clearly prove it isn't behind on that area. =)
If I had a buck everytime some ignorant, stuckup, self described digerati exhorting someone that they should be using a "real database" or "real programming language" or "real operating system" than I would be typing this from a wireless laptop on the beach on my own private island.
What makes you so sure that MySQL was the source of the problem? You know I have seen error messages from "real" databases before, Oracle, DB2, etc. The problem could be from bad programming, hardware failure, network loss, etc.
I know it is always easier to just sit back and wait for others to do things. In this case make donations. I do not use Blender, I probably will not use it in the foreseeable future, but I might end up using free software that uses Blender. Anyways, thank you folks for the donations. Every one and all of them counted :-)
... you can (if you want to) make a userfriendly and efficient interface - the two are not contradictory.
We donated our money to the Blender project with the expectation that it would be Open Sourced and GPL'd - however, this seems not to be the case. Included in the source is the so-called 'BL License' that allows 3rd parties to use the existing Blender code base and keep their modifications to themselves. This stifles a major part of the GPL and is not what we paid for!
From the License:
For teams that don't want to operate under the GPL, we're also offering
this "non-GPL" Blender License option. This means that you can download
the latest sources and tools via FTP or CVS from our site and sign an
additional agreement with the Blender Foundation, so you can keep your
source modifications confidential. Contact the Blender Foundation via
email at license@blender.org so we can discuss how we handle the
practical matters
From an engineering standpoint, it isn't bullshit at all. It's the same as processor power and power consumption. While you could in -theory- create a processor that was both fast and low power, that doesn't make it bullshit when you decide to optimize for one or the other. Interface design is engineering just the same, and you almost always have to make tradeoffs.
The enemies of Democracy are
Because it does rule. The open-source world doesn't really have had any good 3D modeler (and only a handful of even remotely tolerable renderers - no, PoV-Ray isn't open source, yet).
(And, people who say it's not intuitive and the interface sucks just don't get it. Trust me, it is a wonderful program to work with once you get hang of it. =)
(Okay, this paragraph is probably going out of hand, but within realms of argument...) What do you get if you buy something that's compatible with some obscure, undocumented Windows software? Uh, a server that is tailored to work together nicely with some proprietary API that was never meant to see the light of the day. This, as opposed to funding development of some standard server. Why pay for Exchange compatible calendar/mail server? Why not pay for development of vCalendar / SMTP server? Why not tell your boss that using a standard server would probably mean higher security and increased reliability? </offtopic>
Of course, the same argument could be said of Blender: it only took some open formats as input, processed a proprietary format, and spewed out a (somewhere) standardized file in one form or other. But it could also be argued that there are still not that good standards on this field (swapping a model file from one modeler to another is always a nice way to spend a weekend), and that Blender does support a few of currently known "open" formats (or at least provide some way of converting).
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Why not join together as a community and purchase something better like a mail/calendaring server that could compete with exchange? ... Why the hell doesn't the community get organized and purchase that?
Go right the fuck ahead. Fire it up. Ask around. Raise some money.
Do you think these people who got Blender GPL'd would take their money back to give to some exchange client? I think not.
People put their money where they want to see development. Blender is far more exciting software than what you speak of to most of the people here.
The people bitching about blender are probably those that have nothing better to do than bitch most of the time; probably much like yourself.
- Classical music alternates frequently between very long notes (sometimes held across eight or nine measures) and very quick notes (sixteenths very frequently, occasionally thirty-seconds or faster). Representing both of those notes in a human-readable form, without changing your scale every measure and thereby negating the whole point, would be very difficult. If you try to avoid that by defining the standard measure width by the most cramped measure, you're still in trouble because you'll end up with such long measures that you cannot easily guage the distance of your notes and therefore also negate the value of the system. In other words, you'll have to add other notations to your staff until you negate the benefit which you are proposing.
- Your solution works great for computer, but I want you to try to tell musicians who notate pieces (which would be any professional musician anywhere and any half-decent music student as well) that they should bring a ruler to practice to ensure their notes are the proper width. There is a major value to our current system, which is I can do it with an unsteady hand and a pencil on sheet music propped in front of me at 45 degrees. With your system I'd have to lay it flat, take out a ruler, figure out how wide the measures were, divide that width by the width of the note I wanted to draw, line that note up with the end of the previous note, and then draw the right length. I fail to see this catching on.
There are other problems with your system too--for example, what happened to rests?--but quite frankly I think the above two complaints are sufficient enough.So, you're advocating something akin to guitar tab which displays the lengths of notes. (Disclaimer: I play classical guitar as a hobby and have zero tolerance for tab.)
Tell me this: with tab, how can you tell, just by looking at the score, in which key the piece is played? If your primary purpose in reading music is to reproduce the sounds a composer wrote down, then tab (or your variation of tab) may suffice, but it does not suffice for conveying music. It certainly won't help if you want to try to improvise off the score. It won't help if you want to try to analyze the music, to find patterns, to figure out a composer's "style", etc. How can you tell, by looking at tab, that a composer has moved from one key to another but is still developing the same motif in the new key?
Tab (and variations of it) have been around may years (perhaps even longer than standard notation - this would require some research, but I recall that music for the first string instruments was written using some sort of tab). The reason it's been supplanted by standard musical notation is because standard score is better. It's taken a long time to develop standard notation and it may be difficult for beginners because it's meant to convey a lot of other things which aren't too important when you're trying to figure out how to tap out greensleeves on a keyboard. Learning to read score does, unfortunately, take time, but so does learning music.
I also use vi and would leave any job that required me to code in that hyped-up notepad variant which is called Visual Studio (leave the home row to use the ARROW KEYS!?). I have no idea about any of this 3-D stuff (I understand the math, but that's about it), but I trust that the professionals in the domain have quite different needs than the amateurs.
Last time I said this it started a huuuge flamewar.
As well it should :)
This is redundant, but....
Blender has a pretty easy GUI compared to some of the other ones out there. Once you get the basics down its very easy. It *is* a one hand on keyboard, one hand on mouse kinda deal, but its just as complicated as say...maya.
I too was once in a position of confusion... But then I went out to my local library and actually got a book on blender. The first chapter gave me a boost and I figuered out the rest on my own. Try it.