Blender's stance on the free nature of the project and paid GPL add-ons

Ton Roosendaal, the creator of the Blender 3D modeling system, announced asserts that Blender has been and always will be a free project, distributed under the copyleft GPL license and available without restrictions for any use, including commercial purposes. Ton emphasized that all developers of Blender and plugins that use the internal API are required to open their code under GPL and contribute to the common cause, agreeing that by utilizing the work of others, they also allow their contributions to be used under the same terms.

The reminder about the free nature of the project was prompted by dissatisfaction among many plugin developers regarding the emergence of a new service Blender Depot, which allows users to select the plugins of interest for Blender and then download and install them all at once.

The issue is that despite the fact that all plugins for Blender are required to publish their code under the GPL license, it has recently become common practice for authors to sell their plugins through the catalog store Blender Market. Plugins are open-source, but their authors are entitled to provide installation packages through a paid download service. The GPL does not prohibit such sales, which allow authors to generate revenue for the further development of their plugins.

Blender Depot uses existing GPL code of add-ons for free distribution, undermining the established business model. For example, the RetopoFlow add-on is offered for download for Blender Market $86, but is completely free for installation through Blender Depot or manual code downloading from GitHub. Moreover, it is possible to create a paid service and sell packages bypassing the authors (for instance, commercial Linux distributions engage in similar product sales formed from GPL components). From a legal standpoint, such practices are entirely legal, as the GPL allows for the unrestricted distribution of the product. However, developers of paid add-ons for Blender are dissatisfied with the actions of Blender Depot and

have begun discussions started the discussion The ethics of creating services for the free distribution of GPL products circumventing the paid delivery channels used by their authors, as well as the feasibility of applying the GPL in the project and the possibility of using a separate license for the provided API extensions. According to some developers, the ability to receive rewards has led to the creation of many useful extensions for Blender, and the emergence of services like Blender Depot could disrupt the established ecosystem.

Source: opennet.ru