Blender is Free Software — Blender Developers Blog (2024)

• Juan Gea
• June 9, 2019

Ton explained it very well, I see several points here:

1.- No one is preventing you to sell an addon, even when it must be licensed under GPL, in this case Ton says that you charge for teh download service, I think differently, what you pay for is the continuous development and evolution of the addon and support for it (and for the download service too hehe)
Make that clear and users will be happy to pay for it.

2.- If you want to connect any Blender addon with a closed source piece of software, there are ways, like the bridges Ton spoke about, of course anyone is free to clarify or not clarify something, so if you want a proper answer for this the best way is to contact the FSF, they will charge around 900€ (coud be more/ could be less) to solve the inquiry, but you will have the solution coming from the maximum authority (below court) regarding GPL licensing

3.- Many persons have described here different solution, I also would like some commercial plugins to come to Blender form other platforms, but sincerely I don’t see the actual real need for it, and I’ll explain this:
– We could want more render engines, but Cycles is flexible enough and completely open source so we could be better hiring more develpers to implement the features we miss, like more AOV’s, other rendering techniques, etc… we CANNOT do that with other engines like Corona, Vray or Arnold, we are left in the developers hands while with Blender and Cycles we can decide the future of it, not just with the love of our hearts, but with the money in our pockets, and while we can fund B.I. in the dev fund, or the Blender Cloud, something I think completely necessary, we can also hire devs on our side to make them work in the specific features we need/want, this goes for any medium/big studio, they can make Blender grow fast, we have MANY features coming from Tangent and Theory, imagine if every studio dedicates part of their dev force to develop Cycles features for production!!!

– For other things like other types of plugins, for example, Itoo Software’s plugins (which BTW they are not present outside of Max… not Maya, not C4D) there are alternatives, like for example for the time being Animation Nodes, it’s not just for motion graphics, but also for tools development, it give us amazing capabilities, we also have Python addons or scripts, and finally if we need high performance C++ addons there are other options, like Cython or Boost, or programming directly inside Blender!

And yes, I know that not everyone is a dev-wannabe like myself, or knows anything about the technical world, but hey… what do you do when you purchase a 500€ plugin? or what do you do when you pay 700€/year for a plugin? you pay for the devs, ok… pay for some dev, gather some people that really wants a feature (like a new particle system) talk to a dev that is able to do it, manage to get some funding and pay that dev 700€ in a year (for every person that wants that feature) and you will get the new particle system, look what Tyson Ibelle has done with TyFlow, it was just 1 person in 2 years… 1 person!! So it’s not a big problem to get high quality addons and evolution inside Blender, in fact is MUCH BETTER than in closed source software environments because you don’t depend on any Auto-whatever manager to decide what’s best for you, an egg spline, a tear-off viewport or a full fluid simulation system (TRUE STORY BTW)

So, for me personally took a while until I understood the Blender and GPL ecosystem, and I was amazed for another thing, the endorsment from the users, yes addons are GPL but in general I’ve never seen a high traffic about sharing paid addons, it’s not piracy, it’s totally legal, but people respects developers and want the development to continue so they pay the developer, and you know why the prices are so much lower than in other ecosystems? because you are actually paying the developer or the development group, not the big company that fagocitates the money to be used in marketing for some new shiny product that should have been a new feature in the product you already have.

So to wrapt it out:

1.- You can sell addons

2.- You can ask for closed source addons and developers can develop closed source addons

3.- Questions can be clarified out by the FSF lawyers, Ton or the BI don’t have to, in fact they don’t have any power over the interpretation, the FSF is the best way to go IF you really want to, and please make the document public if you want to pay for the clarification (that’s just me asking, you are not forced too do that of course) but…

4.- …IMHO it will be like shooting in your feet, is much better to develop for a sustained Blender evolution in the future, to hire developers by yourself, to improve Blender between all of us, the paradigm change is that WE have the Blender source code, WE have the power, solo-freelancers, Small studios, medium studios or big studios, the power belong to us, not to someone in a big company, so let’s leverage that power, lets fund Blender, loets hire devs ourselves for our teams or lets involve ourselves in development (the ones who are developers)

I want things to be clear about closed source software, just because I think it adds a layer of freedom, but I totally endorse GPL, Ton’s opinion and B.I. position about GPL, it’s possible to make business and money with GPL, it’s just a different paradigm, we had an absurd paradigm change with the absurd SaaS rental license systems, well this is another one, the first was against users, this is in favour of users and the software itself, learn how to benefit of GPL in business and do that.

Busines is legitimatem we all need money to live, to evolve, we need and want to pay for computers, offices, houses, food and many other things, this is just a different way of making money, RedHat discovered it many years ago, the actual value of all this is the actual real service, not the code by itself.

My 2 cents…

BTW, totally agree with Dimitri Paiva: “If people don’t want to pay for an add-on, these people would probably pirate software as well (Blender and/or others)”

P.S.: a good way or platform to find developers to be hired by small teams could be a great addition, I know that there is Blender Network, but you have to pay to be there, something free that charge only a small fee for the job when someone is hired could be better and expand developers/artist visibility, but that’s my opinion, this could be also organized outside of the B.I. frontiers by some users.