Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Blender was proprietary and ultimately purchased and released under the GPL.

Is that the solution to other creative tools? Identifying other cross platform capable proprietary software that can be purchased and relicensed.



Probably not at this point in time. Back when Blender was released, I think there was less reliance on third party libraries (in general), but especially those that would complicate releasing the software as open source later. I don't think this was as much a conscious decision as it was about making sure you had full rights to the code you used back when Blender was started and open-sourced.

Now so many projects take on dependencies that require NDA and proprietary licenses, it's unlikely that this type of creative tool would see the light of day after being closed-source. I can't imagine any industry leading creative tools not getting to market more quickly by purchasing software that gives them an edge for the operating system they are running in. I hope that I'm completely wrong, and possibly there is someone out there that is using software that is easy to rewrite, or replace, if the license doesn't allow open-sourcing.

I was in classes in the early 2000's with people taking multimedia courses, and Blender was just starting to become more well known. The school I went to taught 3DS Max and Maya, which had their own learning curve. I think 3D rendering is just difficult from a UI/UX place, and Blender got in at the right place at the right time. I was in software development, but my friends that had their heart into 3D rendering said Blender was a bit different, but not so challenging as moving between Photoshop and GIMP. That's not anything against GIMP, just a point of comparison, I think GIMP is fine the way it is and haven't been able to follow the UI of Photoshop since CS2 era.


Also historically true of OpenOffice.


Yep, the difference being Sun purchased Star Division and released StarOffice as OpenOffice.org while maintaining the proprietary fork for a while too.

And now StarOffice is dead and LibreOffice, a fork is the one people are using.

(Hi Seth!)




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: