#6 The Blender Market and the "Dreaded" Commercialization of Open Source Tools

Posted on Saturday, Oct 11, 2014
In this episode, I respond to a topic that was brought up here in the comments of an earlier episode, as well as on Twitter. Namely, the notion of selling extensions, add-ons, assets, and so on for open source tools. Specifically, this was brought up as it pertains to the Blender Market, a site by the folks at CG Cookie with the purpose of letting Blender users sell these kinds of things to other Blender users. It turns out that this is a pretty interesting topic to talk about (I should know… I did it 3 times).Originally posted on monsterjavaguns.com.

Show Notes

In this episode, I respond to a topic that was brought up here in the comments of an earlier episode, as well as on Twitter. Namely, the notion of selling extensions, add-ons, assets, and so on for open source tools. Specifically, this was brought up as it pertains to the Blender Market, a site by the folks at CG Cookie with the purpose of letting Blender users sell these kinds of things to other Blender users. It turns out that this is a pretty interesting topic to talk about (I should know… I did it 3 times).

In personal news:

And of course, I give a rundown of some the latest news as it pertains to open source and creative tools:

Whew… I wrote a lot. On toward next week!

4 Archived Comments

Matt, Oct 14, 2014

Thank you very much for the podcast!

As for the commercialization of open source tools, I do understand why some people fear this trend.

If avid, skilled programmers keep on creating such great tools like the ANIMAT add on, or the Contours add on for the market only, will they ever be integrated into the trunk, or are we going to have some sort of parallel development in the near future?

Many sellers on the market point out that the main advantage compared to openly published add ons is the fact that they keep on updating their products, in order to ensure future compatibility etc…While this is definitely an advantage per se, it probably means that most their add ons will stay on the market for the time being and I find it unlikely that the internal blender development is going to invent/implement features that have already been realized with the help of such commercial plugins.

Of course everyone is free to sell anything under the GPL, but in my opinion it would be sad, if we are going to end up with a “light version” of Blender you can download for free, but in order to get the real deal, you have to purchase numerous, commercial add ons, while Blender should be “3D creation for everyone”. Just my 2 cents :)

Jason, Oct 14, 2014

I understand that concern. But look at it like this: The tools hooks that allow for ANIMAT were put in place by Aligorith (Blender’s primary developer for the animation system). He even mentioned that he’d plan on adding such a feature himself. However, there are a lot of other [arguably more pressing] development concerns in the animation system that he’s had to focus on.

So as users, our choices are either to not have the tools until Aligorith gets more off of his plate, or benefit from some other developer (Matt Heimlich, in this case) adding them. Even if those tools come at a cost, at least they’re available… and Aligorith is free (for the time being) to focus on bigger issues. If he gets time to come back and code his own version of tools like the ones ANIMAT provides and include them in master, there’s still the chance for that. Yes, there may be a bit of toe-stepping should that happen, but I’m confident that it’s something that the community can handle gracefully.


l, Oct 26, 2014

wouldn´t it be nice if there was more structure

like chapters within the stream of the podcast like here:

practical example

http://freakshow.fm/

its a podcast software which allows this kind of feature

http://podlove.org/

it would make it easier to quote / refer to your stuff

like youre stuff

kind regards

l

Jason, Oct 28, 2014

Setting up chapters (and having a web frontend that recognizes them) would certainly be useful. I’d not come across podlove before; it looks interesting. It may be a bit heavy-handed for my uses, but maybe it really is the right fit. I’ll look into it.

Thanks for the heads-up.

Hosts

Jason van Gumster

Jason van Gumster

“I make stuff. I make stuff up. On occasion, I stuff-up what I make. I don’t do much stuff with make-up… though I’m not above trying. I work in all kinds of media: words, animation, ink, coffee, wood, video. And, of course, I’m really passionate about open source and open content, so that’s what I talk about in this show. Books I’ve written and other creative experiments I’ve made can be seen on monsterjavaguns.com.”