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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand what your GPL comment has to do with this situation at all. Nobody is even talking about modifying blender in the first place, let alone improving it in ways that could be contributed back, let alone would they have any reason not to contribute back.

This is just asking the blender community what they think about some distribution and upload scripts.

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"We'd hope that this will get enough of our users exposed to and interested in Blender so they will be inclined to work on Blender plugins that would talk to Steam's backend services such as Workshop."

doesn't sound like a modification to you?

'make a plugin for' doesn't sound like a modification of the original, no.

And even if it was, I don't see why BSD changes wouldn't get shared back here.

Doesn't sound like, but (probably) is. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html

"If a program released under the GPL uses plug-ins, what are the requirements for the licenses of a plug-in? (#GPLAndPlugins) It depends on how the program invokes its plug-ins. If the program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, then the plug-ins are separate programs, so the license for the main program makes no requirements for them.

If the program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. This means the plug-ins must be released under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license, and that the terms of the GPL must be followed when those plug-ins are distributed.

If the program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the ‘main’ function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case."

http://www.blender.org/education-help/faq/gpl-for-artists/#c...

"Can I sell plug-ins for Blender?

Yes you can, but only if you provide the plug-in and the sources to your clients under the GNU GPL license. The client then benefits from all rights the GPL offers; free to use it, or even distribute it when they wish.

Only if the plug-in doesn't work within Blender as "acting as a single program" (like using fork or pipe; by only transferring data and not using each others program code) you have the full freedom to license the plug-in as you wish."

If Blender is GPL but the plug-in interface is Python and thus only GPL-Compatible, why can't the plugin be GPL-Compatible and thus not require providing sources?

Because the critical point isn't the use of python. The critical point is that your plugin code is running in the same O/S process as the parent application.

Also I don't think that's how "GPL Compatible" works.

What process the code runs in is a complete distraction, I'm going to ignore that part. It has nothing at all to do with linking or derivation.

Anyway, we're talking about plugins that upload files to steam with a simple interface, so they could easily be independent code, sharing no internal data structures.

I'm not ad-libbing, you're arbitrarily deciding to ignore the GPL, with no justification. It's not a distraction, it's the whole point.

At this point there is no talk of modification, but if Blender became a large part of Valve's modification ecosystem there would surely be some back-and-forth source modification going on.

While Valve wouldn't be able to rerelease blender with new changes unless the changes themselves are released under the GPL in some form, there's nothing stopping them from making changes and using them internally. If they want to make tools available to their community and cannot do so under the GPL, they can aways use a dual-licensing scheme.

You can't dual licence someone else's GPL code. That's why companies that want to do this need contributers to assign copyright. For existing projects this would often be too much work to be worth the bother (though not impossible, I believe x 264 did this, and Firefox has done similar things in the past).

Couldn't they dual-license just their own modifications?

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