Hacker News Reader

Comment by cuddlyogre | Hacker News Reader

I think it is important to distinguish between Blender and Cycles and Eyesight, the render engine that Studio uses that is in question.

Blender is the application and Cycles is the render engine.

Studio itself is a Unity application that would almost certainly be incompatible almost in its entirety with any source code they could pull from Blender. At that point they would be porting logic.

Their Eyesight renderer is a separate application that looks to be a fork of Blender with everything but Cycles pulled out. COPYING.txt explains that Eyesight is based on Cycles using the Apache License v2.

C:\Program Files\Studio 2.0\PhotoRealisticRenderer\win\64\license if you're curious.

Not that it excuses them necessarily, but Studio was not created by LEGO. Bricklink was purchased by LEGO relatively recently and had no say in its development. It is very likely a small team built it not even thinking about legalities.

View on HN

> Bricklink was purchased by LEGO relatively recently and had no say in its development. It is very likely a small team built it not even thinking about legalities.

1. being small doesn't exempt one from following the law.

2. if that is the case, someone at Lego didn't do their homework during the acquisition.

You ascribe a level of malice that is unwarranted.

1. No. But laws are rarely written in a way that people without a lawyer can understand.

Do you fully understand every EULA you agree to? Do you keep up with changes to the licenses of everything you use on a daily basis and immediately update your processes based on any changes you don't like? Do you have the expectation that everyone can do such a thing? Is there the expectation that everyone have a lawyer ready to review everything they touch?

2. They probably didn't. But Bricklink has such a footing, they likely thought it would be worth whatever hassles came up.

Lots of people didn't like the idea of Bricklink being bought by LEGO. Partly because it increases LEGO's control over the building block industry. Partly because it seemed to have come out of nowhere.

> But laws are rarely written in a way that people without a lawyer can understand.

The GPL has been around for decades (v1 is 34 years old), and it was written by a programmer. Unlike EULAs, it's a standard text that rarely ever changes (last time was almost 16 years ago). There are copious amounts of resources online, explaining in plain English what you can and cannot do with it, including all the grey areas.

GPL and LGPL are cultural cornerstones of the opensource community, so I honestly struggle to justify the ignorance, let alone defend it. Obviously shit happens (as I showed in another comment), but "we are a small team" is not an acceptable defence for abusing a license.

> Their Eyesight renderer is a separate application that looks to be a fork of Blender with everything but Cycles pulled out.

If it’s a separate application complying with the GPL is trivial — either link to blender.org and/or publish their patches.

I highly doubt they have any secret sauce in there but just needed a way to call cycles without having to write a bunch of code…which is kind of ironic because cycles used to be able to be called from the command line (might still be, dunno) so doing it this way was probably more work in the end with the added bonus of bad press.

Though, admittedly, cycles had some XML file format that was a train wreck. I tried to come up with an XSD schema for it at one point but, umm… train wreck.

People should just ask these things because it isn’t secret knowledge where you need some $megabuck$ consultant to avoid problems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com