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Comment by dagmx | Hacker News Reader

Blender has a lot of things lacking however:

* It too is crash happy just in different ways. However Maya scales better with large scenes than Blender does and that's key

* Blenders licensing is a deterrent. Very few people want to deal with GPL.

* Blender is not good for extensibility if you're looking for performance. The API is unstable and exposed only via Python. Studios need to extend the DCCs and Blender doesn't allow for it in the way they need unless they fork the whole app.

*Blender has no professional support contract. This is very important for studios.

I think Blender is awesome, but a lot of the stuff that makes it appeal to freelancers doesn't appeal to big studios. In some cases like the licensing, it pushes them away.

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> * Blenders licensing is a deterrent. Very few people want to deal with GPL.

Why would a studio care about this? A tech firm would certainly care, but the entertainment industry? They probably don't know what GPL is and would probably just associate it with "free"

I can assure you that legal teams in studios are just as aware as those in the tech field, even with the (for the most part) distinct lack of apparent software distribution.

Even if it's just for internal consumption, legal likes to know what's going on and where it might impact them later.

However, the GPL and other copyleft software will not for the most part have much of an effect on studios unless they sharing some of their IP they've created with the broader community, partners, and/or proprietary software vendors.

GPL may as well mean radioactive as far as legal is concerned.

A friend worked at a company where they banned GIMP as they feared that editing logos and other trademarks in it could invalidate them.

Even working for a tech company, I don't think I would suggest using anything GPL as it would cause a fuss.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty certain that's not how the GPL works. It has no effect on the content you create using the tool. It places restrictions on redistribution of the code itself. I don't think there are any limits on what you do with gimp or blender, unless you are modifying its code and redistributing it.

Yes the GPL doesn't apply to work created by GPL software. I've heard people in companies be worried about it though because they misunderstand "using GPL libraries" as applying to work created as a product of them, rather than strictly software.

The Blender Foundation is quite upfront about this though to prevent misunderstandings. It's directly addressed on the page that explains the license: https://www.blender.org/about/license/

The case in point here though was GIMP not Blender. I'm not sure whether they provide or provided such clarification.

They do in their FAQ: https://www.gimp.org/docs/userfaq.html#can-i-use-gimp-commer...

That is correct, but there are plenty of lawyers who interpret things incredibly overly-conservatively to save their own ass, just in case.

If you're a senior enough manager and have a legitimate business reason then you can often push back enough and get them to give in, but it's really a question of whether it's worth your time and effort internally.

Tons of widely used software -- Linux, for one -- is GPL.

The current version of GPL is 100% toxic at many places I know of - this is not overly conservative lawyers - you have all sorts of rules around releasing your encryption keys - secure boot chains etc - it’s a no go and viral

Of course - the GPL thing is just FUD. The company I work for (Red Hat) sells tons of GPL software to small and large companies, including huge media/entertainment companies, and none of them is talking about how the GPL is "radioactive".

Because libc is licensed under LGPL and not GPL. GPL in and of itself isn't bad if you're not developing code that links it in. LGPL is also widely used in the CG industry (Qt etc...). If Blender licensed their API under different terms it would greatly open things up.

Studios are very much tech firms themselves.

Quite a few have released commercial software, share proprietary software with partner/vendor companies , or contribute to OSS.

As with any tech company, the GPL is a very unwelcome license for fear of how far reaching it can be.

There are definitely management types that see "free" software as "I can't yell at the vendor if something goes wrong." I've seen this many times in government contracts. It's a CYA move IMHO. Even if the vendor is never going to fix the bugs you find, you can at least blame them for not delivering on time.

Of course it's even more silly when you consider that you're never going to be making patches to Maya, so in theory nothing is lost on the Blender side here.

Maya has support licenses (as do most commercial DCCs). Studios can get Autodesk to patch Maya for you and give you custom builds.

Studios write a LOT of custom code for their pipeline and tools. If you were to go to ILM or Dreamworks or WDAS and watch someone use Maya there, it would look COMPLETELY different from what you see at home.

Given that, I'm not surprised that the (not-always-technical) lawyers are worried about GPL.

Current version of GPL is an absolute no go for many larger places - even Ubuntu ended up dropping it for parts of stack - risks are way too high

> even Ubuntu ended up dropping it for parts of stack

"even" Ubuntu? Are you implying that Canonical are some kind of champion of free software?

Yes - they ship open source and are generally more comfortable with open source licensing because they have much more experience with it.

Expecting an entertainment industry org (which were specially attacked in latest version of GPL around DRM) to be comfortable seems far fetched.

> Blenders licensing is a deterrent. Very few people want to deal with GPL.

I see this claim taken seriously all over the place, and I just don't get it. How in the world is the GPL actually an issue?

The GPL does not apply to anything made with Blender; only changes made to Blender. You can very trivially use Blender without ever dealing with the GPL.

Do studios really think they need to make changes/extensions to Blender itself, then keep those changes totally private and proprietary? How absurd!

I just can't for the life of me think of a scenario where the GPL would actually inconvenience a studio. The only potential problems I can imagine are beaurocratic FUD like having a legal team arbitrarily demand every tiny piece of work be owned by the studio. What a silly reason not to use better tools.

It's not absurd that corporate entities would make changes to their software without a desire to release those changes as code. It has serious implications on patents etc...

If Blender had a stable C API that was dual licensed, you'd see a lot more studio uptake IMHO. Heck, even libc is dual licensed.

This all comes down to the GPL not being well received by most tech corporations. People can argue whether that's got merit or not. However it's a long standing fact that tech companies do not like having dependencies on GPL code that can "infect" their code base. Entertainment studios are the same. They're largely tech companies at their core that create art.

When you write plugins (which VFX studios write a lot of for various DCCs like Maya, Nuke, Katana, Houdini) for GPL software, are the plugins then derived works? Does Blender's License have an opt-out clause for that?

Sometimes (but not often) these plugins do need to be shared with other studios (or even the vendor - Netflix is starting to get fairly aggressive in asking for copies of the source work, but that doesn't really work well with every studio having a custom pipeline and different ways of doing rigging / deforming), but it looks like it's going that way. In this scenario, is "sharing" "distributing" from the license point-of-view?

Large VFX/Animation studios are not going to open source critical plugins that given them potential edges. They want them to be totally private and their IP.

The large studios have a lot of research / IP stuff going on as well, they are basically tech houses (hundreds of software devs), and they really care about IP (both software and the client's material).

Current version of GPL is an absolute no go, especially if you need to import an api / sdk style interface into your extensions and tooling - the GPL is viral. You import a GPL library to interface and your stuff is now GPl.

and latest version requires release of encryption keys etc etc - all major studios WANT content protection to work and the GPL is explicit in its attacks on that

> all major studios WANT content protection to work and the GPL is explicit in its attacks on that

They want content protection on what? Their tooling? They want DRM on the plugins they write for the tools they use? How or why?

If you import a GPL library into your plugin your plug-in / add on is now GPL. They don’t want that.

GPL has what is called anti-tivoisation / DRM. This license was designed to specifically target the entertainment industry.

Even Ubuntu had to get a different license for boot loader to avoid risks here

> They don’t want that.

Again: why? Because they have a grudge against the GPL's anti-DRM?

That's still FUD. There is nothing that a studio would be doing with Blender where they would want to implement DRM.

Sure, they will want DRM to be used in the distribution of the content they make with Blender; but that is totally separate from Blender itself and the GPL. It's not like the film itself will contain a copy of their asset creation or rendering pipeline!

They don’t want to open source the tools and programs they develop as part of their pipelines that tie into GPl or each other - GPl is viral and a library import triggers it.

In terms of the tivoization / drm provisions - the GPL is viral - it only takes one screw up or chain of viral connection to blow their business up. Apple fought the govt to avoid unlocking a terrorists phone, that’s how hard they protect signing keys .

The issue is they don’t know who will use what where, and the viral aspect adds insane risk. Minecraft / roblox and other games may decide to add design pipelines or render chains. Or they may want to run the software on golden image VDI pools that are locked down.

Even Ubuntu was so worried about the chain risk they changed bootloader license away from latest GPl

> In terms of the tivoization / drm provisions - the GPL is viral - it only takes one screw up or chain of viral connection to blow their business up.

Did I not just finish explaining how that is not true?

The GPL is only "viral" to software that it is licensed with, and extensions to that share meaningful data structures with that software.

The GPL does not cover content created by GPL licensed software.

> The issue is they don’t know who will use what where, and the viral aspect adds insane risk.

Except it's trivial to understand the "viral" aspect of the GPL. It's clearly explained in many places. Therefore, there is no risk at all.

> Minecraft / roblox and other games

Games? We're talking about motion picture and television studios. Then again, plenty of game devs use Blender in their asset creation pipeline without getting the GPL involved in their codebase.

> Or they may want to run the software on golden image VDI pools that are locked down.

So? What does that have to do with anything?

> Even Ubuntu was so worried about the chain risk they changed bootloader license away from latest GPl

I don't know anything about that, but I sincerely doubt the context for that decision is in any way similar there...

All I'm seeing here is FUD. Not one of your examples actually brought up a reason - outside irrational fear - to avoid using Blender to make movies.

Dude - let me make this super simple. These rendering pipelines import the SDKs and APIs they connect with. The pipelines have tons have high value custom code. Under the GPL, they have to be open sourced if they use blender - this is 101 stuff. And under GPL it is viral, if stage 1 is now forced open, the next big set of stuff that integrates with stage 1 is also forced open and so on.

Pixar is not open sourcing their pipeline - period. Do you not understand that these companies build giant and high value software around the various engines?

Listen - I didn't realize how little you understood. This is actually covered in the Blender FAQ's because it can really bite you (even if a small player) if you build an add-on to blender.

"Blender’s Python API is an integral part of the software, used to define the user interface or develop tools for example. The GNU GPL license therefore requires that such scripts (if published) are being shared under a GPL compatible license."

This is cool if you want to use stuff - they make that clear too. "Sharing Blender or Blender add-ons or scripts is always OK and not considered piracy." But for commercial players this is an absolute no go.

This is not FUD, this is hard reality, and no commercial player is going to tie into something like this.

I'm not sure why you're talking about DRM...but software licensing absolutely applies.

Studios work together and with outsourcers. Sometimes that means sharing plugins. Under GPL that would mean they'd have to share their code which is strong IP.

This.

Blender has some rather embarrassing performance choke-points even doing relatively simple things in some cases, that software like Maya and Houdini don't have to the same degree.

GPL code (even if you're not distributing anything) is more of a problem than people would think, especially for places working on very strongly defended IP content (Marvel), where the content owners need to have guarantees that the software used is fully-licensed (there have been quite a few incidents in the industry where unlicensed commercial software was used, which causes surprising issues, like films being delayed), and similarly they need to know the software licenses for non-commercial software used doesn't have "surprises" in (some software has weird additions to licenses, like "must provide credits", and even the artists / developers working on the show for the studio don't necessarily get that).

Extensibility is really the key thing: you wouldn't believe how much custom code is written for glue wrapping around stuff for integration - still mostly Python2, although 3's on the way for the industry, but the fact Blender only supported Python3 when the industry as a whole was still happy with Python2 (they don't really care about unicode, they would have loved the GIL to be removed though) meant it was a non-starter. Similarly, custom plugins (in C++ for performance) are required in huge numbers for various different things, modifiers, deformers, proxy drawing code, etc, etc, and Blender doesn't expose anything like that.

Again, support: Autodesk are far from perfect, but they will fix critical bugs for key customers when they insist - i.e. there aren't work-arounds (often within a week).

Just as a counterpoint: in computational fluid dynamics there are many large commercial companies that use GPL softwares, and there are also commercial companies that offer paid support contracts for those GPL tools. Once it catches on in the community that these tools are good quality, there is no legal risk, and there is good support if you want to pay for that, they tend to spread rapidly.

I think what you're saying is very much in line with my initial comment, if we skip out on extensibility for a second.

If the Blender foundation offered paid support, such that studios used it like a black box (e.g like Maya etc), then the GPL part doesn't matter. They can get someone else to take on the burden and supply them with builds.

Blender however doesn't offer that and I think it's a missed opportunity.

However even if that were the case, extensibility is important. And unfortunately, blender doesn't have any API other than Python, and its API is GPL too. Studios need a C like API for performance reasons, and using the API shouldn't affect the licensing of their own code.

I didn't look but I'd be surprised if there wasn't a consulting company offering the last service

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