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Re-branding Blender (Blender Foundation)
The Blender Foundation has put out a press release about two companies that are re-branding the Blender 3D content creation suite and selling it. While that is not a GPL violation of any kind, the companies are playing fast and loose with copyright: "The companies IllusionMage and 3Dmagix resell via their websites Blender under their own name. Both websites are probably managed by the same person or company.
[...]
On their web pages they intentionally hide that the products are distributions of GNU GPL licensed software, and that the software is freely downloadable as well. More-over, even after contacting them several times, they don't remove copyrighted content from their websites. A lot of text and images have been copied from blender.org and random images - not even from blender - were copied from various CG [Computer Graphics] websites." (Thanks to Paul Wise.)
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Re-branding Blender (Blender Foundation) Posted Feb 1, 2011 17:18 UTC (Tue) by juliank (subscriber, #45896) [Link]
Just for the record, both websites state (at the end) that it is GPL licensed and that source code is available.
Re-branding Blender (Blender Foundation) Posted Feb 1, 2011 17:29 UTC (Tue) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
In the VERY end, in SMALL letters, after long list of BIG banners proposing to pay for this stuff. Scammers probably were scared to blatantly violate GPL, so they played smart pants. Still a scam though.
Re-branding Blender (Blender Foundation) Posted Feb 1, 2011 18:27 UTC (Tue) by cmorgan (guest, #71980) [Link]
Scammers because they mention the gpl in small text? Does the license require a specific size?
The real scam seems like the duplication of copyrighted images. While it would be great if people weren't mislead into paying for something they could get for free it is permitted by the license and the user should ask more questions, do more research and try out a trial version before buying.
Re-branding Blender (Blender Foundation) Posted Feb 1, 2011 18:50 UTC (Tue) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link] Yes - scammers because they intend to obfuscate the fact that the software can be obtained for free, making an impression that it's a 'good deal' to buy from them fro moderate price, comparing to other high priced products. I.e. their intention is to fool the potential customer. It's a scam.
Re-branding Blender (Blender Foundation) Posted Feb 1, 2011 19:38 UTC (Tue) by leomilano (guest, #32220) [Link]
Yes, this is despicable, even if it is legal. The funny thing is that their webpage looks like a scam to begin with. All these cheesy testimonials from alleged customers who saw the light after buying the product, it all looks exactly the same as in any other scam product (the secret for teeth whitening for 19.99 plus S&H, etc)
This sort of thing hurt the Free/Open source efforts, because it makes people think of the GPL as some sort of a loophole to sell shady products. The real question, is there a way to prevent this sort of thing illegal, to begin with? That would require a change in the GPL, or how copyleft/branding is handled.
Re-branding Blender (Blender Foundation) Posted Feb 1, 2011 21:02 UTC (Tue) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
> This sort of thing hurt the Free/Open source efforts, because it makes people think of the GPL as some sort of a loophole to sell shady products.
Only if they read the small print at the end of the page...
Re-branding Blender (Blender Foundation) Posted Feb 1, 2011 23:15 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
then isn't RedHat despicable because they can change $1500/machine/year for software that you can get for free? I don't see links to CentOS on the RedHat site telling them that they can get the same thing for free, or even links to Debian on the pages selling RedHat Enterprise.
and if you think this is a silly example, look at the hate sent towards Ubuntu over just this issue.
face it, it's not only legal to sell GPL software, it's highly encouraged.
the only thing is that people get upset if they think that the company dong the selling isn't contributing 'enough' (and each person's definition of 'enough' varies considerably)
the only real issue here is copying other images and documents without following the license for them.
If these companies (or single company) start selling this stuff, they will need to start supporting it, and at that point they will either undermine themselves (we don't support it, it's really free software, go here for support), or they will start paying people to provide the support for the users, which will result in bug reports if nothing else, but will probably result in them fixing things eventually.
Re-branding Blender (Blender Foundation) Posted Feb 2, 2011 13:44 UTC (Wed) by alflanagan (guest, #5180) [Link]
RedHat makes no attempt to hide that they sell open source, they link to their Fedora free version, and they provide significant value-add. Other than that, yeah, it's exactly the same.
Re-branding Blender (Blender Foundation) Posted Feb 1, 2011 18:28 UTC (Tue) by leomilano (guest, #32220) [Link]
There was a similar piece of news not too long ago in Phoronix:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OT...
I think this will become more of a challenge down the road, as GPL software keeps maturing.
Re-branding Blender (Blender Foundation) Posted Feb 1, 2011 19:31 UTC (Tue) by cabrilo (guest, #72372) [Link]
3dmagix.com makes it (somewhat) clear that the package bundles Blender + 3DMagix. E.g. read up on: http://www.3dmagix.com/features.htm
It says:
IllusionMage makes the same statement:
I for one condone GPL leeching, but these don't seem to be doing anything legally wrong: they are bundling Blender with their documentation. They say this on the bottom of the page:
"(c) Copyright www.3DMagix.com - - All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
I'm not sure how "All rights reserved" plays with "GPL" and "CC 2.0", but to me that seems fair enough. Putting that text in large print somewhere on that page won't sell "their" product.
Not the most moral way to make money, but they don't seem to be "rebranding" the product. Just bundling it with their documentation (I assume their documentation is legal and legitimate). How is that different to bundling GPL products with support, which many companies do?
Re-branding Blender (Blender Foundation) Posted Feb 1, 2011 19:54 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
I think that open source projects themselves should have commercial ventures and pay-for versions of their software. As long as the stuff they are selling is open source I see no moral issue on this.
It's just a guy taking advantage of a market that Blender is not exploiting, and I think that Blender should be.
Re-branding Blender (Blender Foundation) Posted Feb 2, 2011 17:44 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]
Something like 4/5 of commercial ventures end up losing money, and this is pretty much unrelated to whether they have a good product. Part of the magic of open source is that it's low-risk to the developers: they put in whatever they want, make something they like, and have at least what they made. In order to exploit a market, you have to put in a much of money and a bunch of effort, and the return is very unpredictable. I don't blame Blender for not trying it.
Re-branding Blender (Blender Foundation) Posted Feb 1, 2011 22:53 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
did you mean condone or condemn in your statement above?
Re-branding Blender (Blender Foundation) Posted Feb 2, 2011 10:59 UTC (Wed) by cabrilo (guest, #72372) [Link]
> did you mean condone or condemn in your statement above?
Condemn, condEMN! I disagree with using GPL software for profit without giving anything back in return.
Thanks for noticing :)
Free means freedom to exploit Posted Feb 7, 2011 14:13 UTC (Mon) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link] I agree with what others have said about this appearing to be a shady leach operation. However the Free in Free software means people are free to exploit the work of others for commercial gain (as long as they abide by the license). Even the FAQ says:
Qns: Is this some trial software or do I have to pay extra to activate other features? Absolutely Not! This is a FULL fledged licensed working program. You do NOT have to pay any money to use it. About the only avenue the Blender people have is going after them for leaching the art-work that's been lifted. We as FLOSS users can do our bit about educating people about the wonderful Free software there is out there.
Re-branding Blender (Blender Foundation) Posted Feb 2, 2011 6:09 UTC (Wed) by PaulWay (✭ supporter ✭, #45600) [Link]
We also had something similar to this twice with LMMS (http://lmms.sf.net) - two different people coming along and saying "Hey, LMMS is really cool and all but I think it'd be so much better with some branding and a great logo and a professional name and I'm going to charge money for it and I can do so because the GPL allows me and there's nothing you can do about it."
And we said to them:
* Your improvements to the source code still have to be shared, and we'll find those and add them to the LMMS source code even if you publish it in your own site rather than committing the changes back to the repository. That's the GPL.
We've never heard of either of them again... :-/
Have fun,
Paul
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