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Comment by xiange | Hacker News Reader

It looks good, but the GPL license restricts the use cases

I was just a kid in 2002, so couldn’t contribute, but I remember checking the MoneyMeter going up every day, so that the community could buy out Blender and make it free software. GPL does restrict it, but it’s also only the only reason Blender is not a long forgotten piece of software from the 90s.

Well.. Old discussion but I actually think it's the better way (sorry. MIT, you are more free then anything). Either contribute back or stay away from open source work that others did for you.

Can you even copyright LLM output? Even the readme points out humans didn't make any of the code.

In this case you just can't spin it any other way than it being a derivative work of Blender. And this is great.

My understanding is that the LLM stripped away the non-UI code from Blender. The majority of the code is ported directly from GPL'd code from the Blender code base.

This is not the spirit of open source.

Most software is not GPL. When comparing this to alternatives like EGUI and GPUI for building a new app, this cannot be considered, while the others can.

GPL makes sense for applications like Blender. For a general purpose library, it's a dealbreaker.

It depends on what you're building. If your app is free software, a GPL library is no problem at all. (and your own code can even stay MIT or Apache.)

It "cannot be considered" only for proprietary apps.

Is it bui's author decision or a consequence of Blender itself being GPL?

in what way?

I believe you could only use this library if the whole resulting app is also GPL.

You can work around that. If you have an application that also has a command-line option, then you could create a UI for that application with this library. The UI module for your application will have to be under GPL because this library is licensed under GPL. But your core program can still be closed-source, as long as you distribute both parts separately. A bit convoluted, but I've seen some applications that do this - they don't distribute the GPL code directly, but ask you to download it separately. (In fact, if I remember right, they had done the opposite of what we are discussing - the developer had created a closed source UI for an open source GPL application, and asked the users to install the open source application through Linux package managers). As far as my understanding of the license goes, this conforms to the GPL only if (1) the GPL code isn't essential or a core part of the application, and (2) you don't distribute both as one application (which implies that the GPL part is absolutely necessary part of your application, thus violating the first rule).

Three things one must never ask: a woman her weight, a man his salary, and an HN commenter what “use case” the GPL ruined for them.

In this case LGPL would be a more expected license for UI libraries, at least.

But that wouldn't work for a straight derivative of a GPL project.

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