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Graphics Software

Blender Fund Raises EUR18,000 In Three Days 336

Posted by timothy from the i'd-like-to-buy-write-now-from-apple dept.
dpm writes:"The Blender foundation looks like it might actually have a chance of raising the EUR 100,000 it needs to buy Blender from the NaN shareholders and make it Open Source. They started fundraising on Thursday, and they already have total pledges of EUR 18,025, with EUR 9,946 actually collected. See the money meter for the current status. If this actually works, what other non-profitable commercial software might we buy cheap and make Open Source? Old video games? Video editing software?"
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Blender Fund Raises EUR18,000 In Three Days More

Blender Fund Raises EUR18,000 In Three Days

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  • ...by selling it to geeks like us, then is it really "unprofitable" software? I'd say that would just be the final way to squeeze money (profit) out of a dead product: sell it to the geeks.

  • MS? (Score:2, Funny)

    by zeth ( 452280 )
    Microsoft Windows maybe? ;)

  • Plan B (Score:5, Funny)

    by quintessent ( 197518 ) <my usr name on toofgiB [tod] moc> on Saturday July 20, 2002 @07:34PM (#3924355) Journal
    ...it might actually have a chance of raising the EUR 100,000 it needs to buy Blender from the NaN shareholders...

    Of course, if they fail to raise the full amount, they may have to settle for a less expensive one from KitchenAid.

    • Re:Plan B (Score:2, Offtopic)

      by ndnet ( 3243 )
      No, Black and Decker. We want STABLE blenders. At my house, we have a 10+ year old B+D that still works. Has KitchenAid even been in business that long?
      • 10+ year old B+D that still works. Has KitchenAid even been in business that long?

        Actually, yes. My house was built in 1987, and had a KitchenAid dishwasher as part of the original appliance set. On the other hand, what brand is KitchenAid LESS expensive than? Or has that changed since Whirlpool bought 'em?
      • Here in Europe, they make power tools and garden implements. I wish I could get a blender half as good as my drill.

  • Commercial Software? (Score:1, Redundant)

    by Peapod ( 568493 )
    What about Windows? We could buy try and buy that one out. What do y'all think?

    -Peapod

  • How about BeOS? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FyRE666 ( 263011 ) on Saturday July 20, 2002 @07:38PM (#3924368) Homepage
    I know, it'll never happen... but if it could be bought in this way it'd save a lot of projects a lot of time ;-)
    • Unfortunately, while I think it would be great for BeOS to rise up from the bitbucket, the fact of the matter is many of us who owned licenses for the operating system felt like we were "donating" since R3. My cd sets date from DP2 to 5Pro, and driver support for a lot of things was still DIY in that final version.

      I'll miss it, and the promise of the insanely fast, streamlined media server on even average hardware, but for me the "batmobile"(to quote Neal Stephenson) has been mothballed. After I get my next job, I'm going to buy a Mac (something I've wanted since I saw the first one in junior high school, but could never afford) and pin my hopes on OSX's BSD kernel keeping developers interested.

  • Xeno's Paradox (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Speare ( 84249 )

    One data point may be encouraging, but it's not particularly useful. People gripe about the ludicrous nature of the prefix, "If this trend continues,". Well, if frogs had wings, they wouldn't bump their ass a-hoppin'.

    Will the donations per day be constant? Linear? Exponentially increasing? Exponentially decaying? Will the total accumulated funds follow Xeno's paradox?

    Tell us a better story next week.

    • Will the donations per day be constant? Linear? Exponentially increasing? Exponentially decaying?

      The growth of a population, such as the spread of a computer worm, typically follows a "logistic growth" [google.com] curve, that is, starting out with roughly exponential growth and ending up with exponential decay of the rate at which new infections occur as the worm reaches "carrying capacity". A worm begins to reach carrying capacity as the number of vulnerable uninfected hosts dies down. See more about the growth rate of a worm population in this article about Warhol Worms [berkeley.edu] by Nicholas C Weaver.

      In the case of a pledge drive, exponential growth comes from word of mouth spread, and Slashdot seems to provide a strong burst in the population of donors. As of this writing, 20854 has been pledged, and the Blender Foundation has collected 11775 of that. The big question in this case is whether the carrying capacity measured in donor contributions exceeds $100,000.

  • Like all that abandonware that's already free, or all those old console games that you can download from almost anywhere, and emulate?
    I don't know if trying to open source old games is such a great idea...I don't think it would really help anything.

    It would be nice to see some music editing software (like a multi-track editor/recorder/mixer) that's closed source go open source...ooh, who wouldn't want an open source version of Cakewalk? Or Logic?

    I'm salivating at the thought.

  • most likely won't be available at any price (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A lot of commercial software likely is using libraries/code licensed from 3rd parties making opening up the code (or selling it) extremely unlikely.
  • or, even better, games with great concepts that crash all the bloody time. Two come to mind; Alien Legacy and Septerra Core are wonderful games. If only they were useable.

    One of the things I like best about open source is the fact that crash bugs get fixed quickly. While it's sometimes a pain to debug little UI bugs, the simplicity of just gdb'ing into a core in *NIX is heavenly compared to Microsoft's debugging solution.

    Who wouldn't love a rock-solid game engine, running a great storyline, compiled specifically for their box's specs?

    Jouster
    • Who wouldn't love a rock-solid game engine, running a great storyline, compiled specifically for their box's specs?

      What you are saying sounds kind of like what Bungie [bungie.com] did when they open-sourced Marathon 2 (the project can be found at source.bungie.org [bungie.org]) Definitely a great game, with a great mod community.

      Go. Play it. Have fun. :-)

  • WordPerfect, absolutely (currently owned by Corel); and possibly Envoy as well (currently owned by Novell, who decided to kill). In the case of Envoy, it would be enough to see its specifications published, so that anyone could write coders and decoders (just like for PDF).
  • I'm a poor student, but I wholefully believe that the open sourcing to blender would be one giant step for the open source community.

    I was just wondering if I were to pitch in 50 dollars or so, would I be able to get a tax deduction on it?

    Sorry, but my understanding of the tax laws (in the US) is very limited, any help would be greatly appreciated!!

    Sunny

    • " I was just wondering if I were to pitch in 50 dollars or so, would I be able to get a tax deduction on it?"

      I Am a regional director for a small non-profit corparation. You can't leagaly take a donation unless they have incorparated as a non profit organization, and filed as such with the IRS. If you try to take the deduction it will go through unless all your deductions are high enough to require they be itemized (I don't have the figures off the top of my head) but will be disallowed if you are audited.

    • If you are truley that poor what is the tax deduction going to do?

      You get what, maybe 10 dollors back in 10 months?

      why not just check the couch cushuns every time your at a party?

  • http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/05/202321 6&mode=nested&tid=126 [slashdot.org]
    often works better than the 'named' url in the article... ;)=
    https http.

    werked for me.
    Other products to buy and make opensource?
    Does AYBABTU say anything to you?

    MOVE ZIG!

  • Too Good To Be True (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    While this sounds great and it would be cool if we could extend the idea to start buying other commercial software and open source it, it isn't as easy as it sounds.

    Say we got enough cash to buy product X and did, product X might depend on a source licence for product Y, we couldn't open source X then with out buy Y also.

    Y will probably depend on things like W and Z...

    Just my imediate reaction -
    Jon
  • Does anybody know what the chances that something like this might be possible in BeOS's future? From what I know, Palm doesn't seem to be actually using the BeOS technology; rather, they bought the company for the engineers.

    Perhaps with enough of a fund we might be able to get BeOS source released! Granted, it would likely have to be a much bigger fund than 100,000 euros, but I'd be willing to wager that there are more people interested in BeOS than in Blender, nifty though Blender is.

    This might be our last chance to save BeOS. If anyone has any information about Palm's plans, please say so.

    • Re:BeOS? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Jeremi ( 14640 )
      Perhaps with enough of a fund we might be able to get BeOS source released! Granted, it would likely have to be a much bigger fund than 100,000 euros, but I'd be willing to wager that there are more people interested in BeOS than in Blender, nifty though Blender is

      When the BeUnited people asked about this, Palm quoted them a price of two million dollars US. Personally, I think if you want open-source BeOS, you might as well support the OpenBeOS [openbeos.org] project instead. It is coming along nicely.

      • Why not try Anyway? Make this deal to the public- You get us the $2m, we acquire BeOS source Code and give it to OpenBeOS. If we don't hit the $2m mark, We give the money directly to the OpenBeOS developers; Either way, it goes to fund an open source beos.

        I for one would gladly shell out some money for that.

  • I hope this doesn't succede too well (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Saturday July 20, 2002 @07:46PM (#3924398) Homepage
    If this succedes too well, it could start a dangerous prescident. Now I like blender, and I hope they open source it, but I hope that companies don't get the idea that this is an easy way to make a quick buck off software you don't want to deal with any more. For example I'd love to see Windows 3.1 (or even 1.0) opensourced, or other software that no money is made on any more (like Mac OS 7). And I wouldn't mind if MS or Apple did that and said "Look, we'll open it up, GPL, do whatever you want with it, but pay us $5k." But I think we can all agree that while it'd be nice to have alot of old software opened up, we shouldn't have to rase $100,000 to do it for each piece of software (assuming 1 euro == 1 USD like it did a few days ago). Now blender is all that company made correct? And they went out of business and they saw this as a way to pay off their debts right? In this curcumstance, I can see them doing this and asking for so much, but let's not start a president.

    PS: If I'm wrong about the circumstances of this, my point is still intact. I wanna see the windows source code, but not if I have to help pay $100,000. ID software has the right idea. Open it up, but say you can't make money off it.

    • Surely only software that people really want the source to will be worth paying for? I couldn't give a rats arse about Windows source, so theres no way I'd bother paying for it. But I may well think about paying for Blender. It's a very neat bit of software, has a lot of community support and is potentially the only decent (read commercially usuable) 3D software available for Linux et al.

    • The 100,000 euro is to pay for the intellecual property so it may be freed. The code is currently the property of investors, and 100,000 is the price to make them go away.

    • Re:I hope this doesn't succede too well (Score:5, Insightful)

      by The Cat ( 19816 ) on Saturday July 20, 2002 @08:53PM (#3924597)
      If this succedes too well, it could start a dangerous prescident.

      Yeah, it might create a market and jobs.

      they saw this as a way to pay off their debts right?

      The horror!

      Open it up, but say you can't make money off it.

      Yeah. Let's all keep our minimum-wage jobs at McCompany. We certainly wouldn't want software to have any *value* or anything, because, well, that might mean someone, somewhere might be making *money* and well, that would mean more jobs, and well, that's just not acceptable.

      (Yes, this is exactly what it sounds like)

    • Re:I hope this doesn't succede too well (Score:4, Interesting)

      by johnnyb ( 4816 ) <jonathan@bartlettpublishing.com> on Saturday July 20, 2002 @09:00PM (#3924618) Homepage
      If this succedes too well, it could start a dangerous prescident.

      *******

      Paying for software is not dangerous.

      ******

      but I hope that companies don't get the idea that this is an easy way to make a quick buck off software you don't want to deal with any more.

      ******

      I hope they do get that idea. I would be willing to pitch in money to free up several software packages that vendors probably don't care much about. Free is about Freedom, not price.

    • The first $100K, if I understand correctly, is going to the investment company that put up a substantial amount of capital to fund Blender's development. Without it, the only other option was to start writing a eulogy for Blender's untimely demise.

    • Re:I hope this doesn't succede too well (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Zathrus ( 232140 ) on Saturday July 20, 2002 @09:59PM (#3924769) Homepage
      As usual, an open source drone has spouted business advice that has no relationship to the real world.

      They can't give it away for free. It has value. There are investors who paid hard cash for the development of the code and while they now know that they're not going to get it all back, they'd like to recoup some of their costs at least.

      Frankly, I suspect they could get more for it in the private market. If anything, they're doing the OS movement a favor by offering it at a discount.

      Want public companies to give away their old source? You realize that doing so would result in them being sued by shareholders, right? The principal officers of a company have a legal obligation to the shareholders to maximize stock value. Giving away IP which has value (and if you think it doesn't, then why do you want to look at it in the first place? The mere fact that you have an interest in doing so and building on it indicates that there is indeed value associated with it, regardless of its age) is contrary to that legal requirement and would result in the board being ousted, fined, and jailed.

      Private companies are another matter. If they have investors (as NaN did), then the investors would probably like some of their money back. If they don't, well, then they're free to do whatever. I do admire how id Software does business - and frankly, they're very shrewd about it. Open sourcing their old engines not only helps the OSS community, but it also pretty much kills the old engine dead commercially. Yes, you can still license it (for only $10k too, compared to $1M+ previously), but the odds of your client being hacked and cheaters ruining the game is way higher. And the original game becomes pretty much unplayable online except amongst friends - again, cheaters have a free hand with the client once it's open sourced.

      I like open source software, and it has its place, but it's not the be-all and end-all of software development, no matter what RMS and his cronies may believe. And whenever I see people spouting bogus information that goes against basic business fundamentals it just shows again and again why open source and Linux in particular continue to have problems becoming mainstream.

      • Re:I hope this doesn't succede too well (Score:4, Insightful)

        by nhavar ( 115351 ) on Saturday July 20, 2002 @10:46PM (#3924866) Homepage
        My understanding was that they already pitched it to the private market and got no takers. This meant that in essence they were going to sit on it until someone made an offer which Ton did. While it might not have been the most lucrative offer it did open up the possibility of future returns to the shareholders above and beyond the initial 100,000 and a way for the company to come back.

        While we assume that investors always make smart choices I think we can see from other investments *cough*AOL*cough*T/W*cough* that they don't. Often investors pull out just at the moment a company starts pulling it together or keep throwing money into a company that's gasping it's last breath.

        Now there are some savy VC's out there but they usually know when to put more in and when to cut their losses. Other VC's would rather sit on something worth a little, holding out for the big payoff, and in the end getting nothing.

        The Blender community has been begging for as long as I know to open source the software not so that it will be free but so that they can contribute to making it better. There are people there willing to put time and effort into the product for free because they love the product and most are more than willing to then see that product sold commercially to fund further success. Open source and commercial success are not necessarily seperate goals.
      • As usual, an open source drone has spouted business advice that has no relationship to the real world.

        This guy isn't any more representative of Open Source or Free Software than John Walker "Taliban" Lindh is of America.

        Using your disagreement with him to paint all free software and open source enthusiasts with the same broad brush is disingenious and inaccurate.

        I for one donated $100 to Blender because (a) I use the program and would have paid that for a commercial product (except that I will never again store data in a proprietary format beholden to a closed source product because my data is what is really valuable, much more so than the software I'm running) and (b) it is a fair deal: the investors get some of their money back (or perhaps make some money ... I have no idea how 100k euro stacks up against their initial investment) and the community benefits from one of the finest 3d animation products becoming Free Software.

        My problem with proprietary software isn't that they make money on it. Hell, I've bought 8 or 9 ports of various Wintel games for GNU/Linux, I paid for a MainActor license back before kino did the job I needed, and I even antied up for Applix back in the pre Open Office days. My problem is the vulnerability of having a vendor stand between me and my valuable data, leaving me vulnerable to orphanage (as happened with Blender initially), forced updates (Windows Word, and other programs too numerous to mention), or insurmountable incompatabilities that make using my data on the hardware and software of my choice difficult or perhaps even impossible.

        Business models that do not affect me in this manner, such as Red Hat's approach, are very compatible with my software requirements (both at home and at work). Those that leave me (or my employer) vulnerable are, at most, stopgap measures until I find something more free (as in freedom) that doesn't leave me so vulnerable.

        The thing is, there are viable business models that are compatible with Free Software and do not require leaving the customer in the awkward situation I described (and most Blender folks find themselves at the moment). Ghostscript, among others, use one approach (there are others): namely to release a product in a non-free manner and charge for it (sometimes for just commercial use, sometimes in general), but with a clause that releases the code under a Free License (like the GPL, if they don't want their competitors to use it against them, or BSD if they don't care and just want it to be free) after a period of time (say, a year or so).

        Most people will gladly pay a little money to have the current version of something, rather than waiting 6 months or a year, but no one likes buying something only to have its value go to zero as bitrot sets in. Knowing the source to today's version of SomeCommericalApp is available, and will be legally freed under a free license a year from now, protects me as the customer against nearly every vulnerability a proprietary product imposes, without costing the software manufacturer their edge in marketing and selling the product today.

        Especially with today's software, where something a year out of date is selling for $5 in the bargain bins anyway, this is really a reasonable approach.

        I probably qualify as a more ardent advocate of Free Software than most, and even I fall far short of the ad homonim brush you paint Open Source and Free Software advocates with ... so while I agree with much of your critique of the original post (and have my own disagreements with the premise that great success in this funding drive would somehow harm the future of free software...quite the contrary I think), I would ask you to be careful in painting such broad, and inaccurate, stereotypes.
      • "As usual, an open source drone has spouted business advice that has no relationship to the real world."

        Of course, you don't mean to say that all free software advocates are drones, do you?

        "They can't give it away for free. It has value. There are investors who paid hard cash for the development of the code and while they now know that they're not going to get it all back, they'd like to recoup some of their costs at least."

        True. Most software companies are locked into a proprietary model.

        But you don't mean to imply that everything that has value must be profited from, do you? I'd call that stance radical capitalism.

        "I like open source software, and it has its place, but it's not the be-all and end-all of software development, no matter what RMS and his cronies may believe."

        Actually, it could be and likely will. And maybe if you read what Stallman has to say with an open mind will you have a better understanding of what it is he has been spending most his life trying to do.

        In fact, I am replying here to say I agree with you, despite being labelled an "RMS crony" and it is likely RMS would too. RMS has advocated a software tax in the past as a way of offsetting development costs. This is similar to what the Blender foundation are doing, in that with the tax scheme people get to choose which project they want their funds to go to.

        Hey, I don't say software development is cheap even with the enormous amount of free software that is available. But proprietary software is not an acceptable model, we need to find a better way. I don't think this is it, but its a positive step IMHO.

        But please keep in mind that there is a difference between someone who advocates the use and development of free software, and someone who wants all software for no cost.
      • They can't give it away for free. It has value. There are investors who paid hard cash for the development of the code and while they now know that they're not going to get it all back, they'd like to recoup some of their costs at least.

        No.

        The only "value" anything has is what somebody is willing to pay for it. If nobody is willing to buy something, it has a value of zero.

        "But we paid a lot to develop this!". Tough. Just because you want something to be worth a lot of money doesn't mean it is. Want to buy some WorldCom stock? The proper business term is "fully depreciated".

        What is happening is that NaN is carrying something on the books as an "asset" that has no value. Gotta keep the stock price up ....

      • What value?

        You're the real drone here.

        Not every product will be valued by the market. Not every product will be valued by the market in the manner that it's corporation would prefer. A few thousand lines of sourcecode has no intrinsic value. Someone has to be willing to BUY the product.

        THAT is capitalism.

        If your product has tanked, for whatever reason, there is no good reason (beyond spite perhaps) NOT to release what is left into the public domain.

        Infact, it is quite arguable that this what the intent of US copyright infact is. A part of the bargain that you make when getting a copyright is that you will enrich the public domain.

        GPLing Blender or Wordperfect would only be equitable.
    • "I hope that companies don't get the idea that this is an easy way to make a quick buck off software you don't want to deal with any more"

      Actually I think we should encourage companies to "make a quick buck" off old software if it will result in more open sourced software.

      I'm thinking of an open source charity that is recognized by the Tax collection agencies, one that companies could donate old software to in return for a nice fat tax deduction that will allow them to "make a quick buck" by lowering their tax bill.

  • Possible issues. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by danamania ( 540950 ) on Saturday July 20, 2002 @07:49PM (#3924408)
    I don't want to sound like a bearer of bad news - and I'm not, just noting an issue that could prevent some projects (given an ideal world where the opensource community can run around buying old software) from being fully usable as open source. One of these affects what would otherwise be a free download from Apple - Mac OS 7.1, and Apple QuickTake driver software.

    6.0.8, 7.0 and 7.5.3 are free downloads, but apparently 7.1 isn't, as Apple only licensed, but doesn't -own- the patents to some technologies included, but which were later not used. Similarly, it's apparently Fuji who own the patents to parts of the QuickTake software - meaning ftp.apple.com has an excellent library of older downloadable software, with a few notable exceptions.

    Of course - if ten thousand people buy the source to something really fantastic that does contain a few patented bits, it's still a good thing... there's the ability to write-out what can't be freely distributed, and re-write parts that can.

    (take all of this post with a grain of salt - I could be full of it)
    a grrl & her server [danamania.com]

  • I'm losing it.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kredal ( 566494 ) on Saturday July 20, 2002 @07:50PM (#3924412) Homepage Journal
    I read it as Bender Fund Raises EUR18,000... Like they were trying to save Futurama or something.

    I'll go back to my cave now.
  • Why not use all the money to pay and help out those that already give to the OSS community? Give some money to KDE/Gnome or whom ever made your desktop. Larry and the other Perl makers are running out o cash, why not give them more?

    Don't encourage those who make crappy commercial stuff!!!!
    • Don't encourage those who make crappy commercial stuff!!!!

      well i wouldn't call it crappy commercial stuff, the software itself isn't inferior by default because it was closed source. And blender definitely is a cool app. By opening up blender they're encourging the use of open source in software engineering.
    • Strategy. Free Software needs a 3d modeler. With Maya seats costing 3k, and the massive amount of money in the Effects Industry, a Free Software solution could gain significant momentum. Projects like Film Gimp [slashdot.org] have benefitted from programmers under the payroll of such effects houses as Rhythm and Hues, and ILM has been interested in helping with development.

      Effect houses create a lot of great software which is used in house only, providing them with a base like blender under the GPL will intice them to use those programmers for projects which are released to the public and thus helping everyone.

      If 2.5 million dollars was put into a project, and we can buy it for 100k, and we can make it Free Software, why start from scratch?
  • Did you just give that poor site the slashdot-click-o-death only to see:

    |_| 100,000
    |_| 90,000
    |_| 80,000
    |_| 70,000
    |_| 60,000
    |_| 50,000
    |_| 40,000
    |_| 30,000
    |x| 20,000
    |x| 10,000

    I though real geeks were immune to graphics :-)
  • Slightly offtopic, but mods - please hang in there...

    I've never had the chance to use blender, but old console games, especially SNES games, really deserve this treatment.

    For example, Yu Yu Hakusho, a surprisingly good Anime, is on Cartoon Network right now. I was browsing a ROM site for a ROM of a game I bought, when I noticed that there were not one or two, but 4 YYH SNES games and a bunch of Game Boy games. Now, in this example, Funimation may own the rights to these games in the US, but they aren't using those rights.

    This could do many things. For old developers that have gone out of business, SOMEONE still owns rights to games that may already even be in English. These people aren't likely going to see any money, but if we could raise a small amount they may be willing to sell the rights to them.

    There are quite a few PC games that fall under this category too. The copyright holders of One Must Fall 2097 gave their work to the public domain a while back. One of the Ultima games was distributed with a magazine freely. I, personally, would love to be able to download games like Jazz Jackrabbit and the like freely and legally.

    This needs to be done. There are many great games and old apps that deserve this treatment.

    That said, raising less than 20% of what's needed for this buyout is depressing, as it's pretty safe to say that donations will slow down a bit.
  • ...that never made it onto slashdot is the Kuro5hin story [kuro5hin.org].

    In about three days, they raised $35,000 for the website, and had over three million ad impressions [kuro5hin.org] registered.

  • I contributed to the Blender fund (Score:5, Insightful)

    by J. J. Ramsey ( 658 ) on Saturday July 20, 2002 @08:04PM (#3924446) Homepage
    Unfortunately, my finances are tight, so I could only give $10. Wah.

    OTOH, if all the Slashdotters did the same (Hint! Big Hint! HINT!), the Blender sources could go GPL in a matter of days.

    Yes, I am shamelessly trying to get you all to contribute, not only to compensate for my lack of funds, but to help keep a worthy, though ideosyncratic, piece of software from becoming part of the bit bucket of history.

    Remember, if Blender isn't freed, it will be left stuck as binary-only software that will never be upgraded, subject to becoming unrunnable as our computers change and evolve.

    Please contribute to the free Blender fund!

    (HINT! HINT! HINT!)
    • Good Man! I gave as well.

      People around here forget that Free as in Freedom doesn't always mean free as in beer.

    • I just become a member as well, $50. I could have done a lot of other things with that money, but I think having a GPL tool like Blender is going to be worth the money.

      The Blender foundation only needs about 2000 members to meet its goal of $100,000, including overhead for collecting the money. If you become a member, then you have a good chance of making a difference in the campaign.

      A lot of people talk the talk, but don't back it up with action. Nows your chance people!

      As a side note. I donated the $50 minimum required for being a member thinking I gave them a little extra, being that all their values are quoted in EUROs and I was donating in US. Only afterwards did I remember how much the dollar has fallen lately : ) Turns out I owe them some change :)

    • What about if product X were sold as proprietary software, with 10% of the purchase price set aside for a 'freeness fund'. When the fund reaches a certain amount, the software is freed. I don't suggest this as a way of maximizing profits but as a way for programmers to make money but still have a useful free package after a few years. (A little bit like Ghostscript.)

      As a user, this would be very attractive. Not necessarily for altruistic reasons, because I want to make a 10% 'donation', but because if the package is popular enough, it's certain to become free eventually. This is a big incentive to start using it even while it is proprietary.

      I wouldn't want to spend my time learning package X if I thought the company would disappear in two years' time, or version 2.0 would come out with a completely sucky new interface and the old version would no longer be available, or even if it might get difficult to purchase extra copies for more computers. But if package X is almost certain to become free software during the next few years, I might be happy to pay for it now.

  • Eldred vs. Ashcroft (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Rayonic ( 462789 ) on Saturday July 20, 2002 @08:06PM (#3924457) Homepage Journal
    Well, if this case [eldred.cc] succeeds, we might be seeing the first programs fall into the public domain since... well, ever. Correct me if I'm wrong, but has any piece of software ever fallen into the public domain unless specifically put there? It's a damn shame, now that I think about it.

    So to heck with buying programs out of copyright prison. Eldred has the right idea in attacking the root of the problem - insanely long copyright extensions! (Of course, that won't necessarily free the code...)

  • PCB Layout Software... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Ivan Raikov ( 521143 ) on Saturday July 20, 2002 @08:08PM (#3924466) Homepage
    "Buying" and open-sourcing some software that can do circuit schematics and PCB layout would actually be nice. Yes, I know about gEDA project [seul.org], and they actually have a nice schematic editor and a pretty decent Gerber file viewer, but the board layout program hasn't even been started yet, or so it seems. And I don't feel like reinventing the wheel and writing all these auto-routing routines, etc. from scratch.

  • The Alphora [alphora.com.] Dataphor [alphora.com] DAE [alphora.com] is the first relational database management system since IBM [ibm.com.] BS12 [mcjones.org] and the QUEL [berkeley.edu] version of Postgres [berkeley.edu].

    It was coded for MS [microsoft.com.] .Net [microsoft.com.], thus it should be readily portable to Ximian [ximian.com.] Mono [go-mono.com] or GNU [www.gnu.org]s & Southern Storm [southern-storm.com.au]s DotGNU [gnu.org] Portable.Net [southern-storm.com.au].

    If such a potentially useful software became publicized and free software, we could have a really innovating no Marketspeak intended , probably killer application the proprietary vendors would have a hard time scrambling after.

    And that with unreprochable theoretical foundations [acm.org] attested [dbdebunk.com.] by the luminars [dbdebunk.com.] of the field [dmoz.org].

  • Yes, I've looked at the clones, and yes, they suck. We need M.U.L.E. All of it. Especially the music. Best party game of all time.

  • ...grrrr...

  • Just made donation (Score:3)

    by suso ( 153703 ) on Saturday July 20, 2002 @09:20PM (#3924676) Journal
    I just made a decent donation to their cause and feel good about doing it. I've used so much open source software that I feel the need to give back or give the gift of something becoming open source. Try to help them out. Even if you don't use blender, give them money as if you were giving money to the entire open source community.
    • Just the news of the foundation buying the sources to make them GPL would hit major news sites around the globe. Maybe it will start a bidding process where companies get involved. We could buy and GPL enough stuff so as to get a jump start on the missing pieces of OSS.

      Maybe it could be a modest revenue model for very small efficient firms: provide a really needed piece of code and held it hostage for a ramson: Freedom (GPL) has a price.

      Only usefull stuff will be GPLd this way and surelly will get developed thereafter. But I wouldn't like all OSS developement to be based on this "oportunity" market. What if we had to pay ransoms for gcc, ghostscript, etc. Ok, some are already GPLd, but if the main developers (and copyright owners) don't GPL the improvements, we'll be out of luck in little time.

      We'd have the freerider and the "i got too greedy" problems combined. :) If there was a way to prevent freeriding we'd be in OSS heaven right now (freerider example: you make a lot of money by using OSSand never contribute anything back - not code, no money, no nothing).

      Just some thought (as usual) ...

  • Open Source video editing and such... (Score:5, Informative)

    by nidhogge242 ( 303730 ) on Saturday July 20, 2002 @09:25PM (#3924687) Homepage
    This is sort of a long post, and it's nowhere as well structured as it possibly should have been. So if you're not interested in reading about the promotion of democracy and free speech via the Internet, then by all means skip it, but if you do read it all the way through then I think that you will not only find it on-topic as to the article in question, but also to the general slashdotian sense of freedom and the individual's rights.

    I could see several points in having a video editing system (complete with sound/dialogue editing and minor FX-functionality) open sourced.

    Although I personally own and use licensed copies for all the programs that I use professionally as a film-maker, many of the people from 3:rd world countries that I've worked with have had problems in acquiring such software because of its high cost. And yes, there is always the opportunity to pull down a cracked version from the Internet. But as this is illegal and manufacturers of editing suites generally check that you have a licensed copy of their program after you've released a commercial production (or at least a widely distributed production with your name on it), this becomes a less attractive option.

    As you all know, there are millions of people that live under such circumstances that they don't have the privilege of free speech and free elections. One of the big reasons that their situation doesn't change is because of the fact that they have no way of showing it to the rest of the world. Yes, there are documentaries about the horrors that occur everyday in underprivileged countries and CNN shows you thousands upon thousands of pictures every year of a world in flames. However, these documentaries and news-flashes, although possibly well meant, all have one major flaw in common: They are not made by the people that should be telling the story.

    The majority of them are produced by, and therefore politically colored by, western media corporations. I'm not trying to say that all such institutions are evil and this is not an anti-corporate post. I am saying though, that such producers generally have the same ultimate goal, which is, as you all know, to make money. Nothing wrong with that, I work hard at doing that myself. But, in the nature of media money-making lies an inherent factor that prevents an actual change in the countries at hand from taking place. And that is the "hot-news" factor. After a couple of days, news about some small civil war or an oppressive dictatorship in a state, that has a name you can't even pronounce, decreases in commercial value. And so the focus of the media-corporation changes and the all that is left of the civil war is a couple of page 9 articles that state some ridiculously high death-toll, in a place that you can vaguely remember hearing about. And yes, I too remember the media-coverage of former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan and so on, and the media-hype there definitely helped bring about a definite change. But these places only make up a tiny portion of all the horrible things that happen.

    The people that should be telling the story (namely the people living in the countries in question), so that a more accurate and consistent picture is projected upon the rest of world, simply haven't got the means to do so. And although an open-source video-editing system would only be a small step on a long road, it would without a doubt make a difference. It doesn't need to have all the functionalities of a fully fleshed out editing suite (you'd have a hard time finding machines that could run one in those countries anyway). It only needs to be able to cut sound and dialogue (in an easyily understandable way) so that the native-filmmaker in question can get all the fundamentals of the production right, and then the people with the funky gear (like myself) can prepare it for distribution on the quality-demanding networks of the western world. In fact, if it was open-sourced and by the community made to run on a cheap machine using an open-source O.S, then all the better. Old editing suites that nobody uses anymore (and because of this are cheap to buy) can seldom run on a free O.S.

    If you did read this far then thanks for listening. I hope you don't feel that I wasted your time.

  • Please god someone get the code to Ultima Online 2, it was a great project that was abandoned, and it would be great if people could finish it out just for small server use even. Unforuntunatly, I don't even know if the code still exists or if EA trashed the whole thing. I know they killed most of the paper records of it.
  • I beg of you here at /. to post an article about mTropolis. One of, if not the most innovative piece of software I have ever seen, bought and used, only to see it bought up and subsequently killed by Quark.
  • I'd love a serious 3d software package that I don't have to pay an arm and a leg for. Right now Maya and 3dsmax are the best ones I know of, there are otheres, but I know those packages really well.

    Once they get closer to the top again I'll give more money, but if everyone pitched in some cash we could have some serious software on our hands ...

    I think it's smart of they open up the source code it, but NOT GPL it. They need to do a license where the company ownes it in the end, but the source code is available to anyone, just nobody else except Blender can sell the a compiled version for profit...

    That way if it takes off again they can have a business still and continue to make money without us having to pay $20 every 6 months to keep it going...
  • One of my biggest irritations with Blender has been the uselessness of the Python API for interactive modelling tools.

    I want to write my own modelling plugins to make specific tasks in blender (enhanced bevel, 'smooth shift') more like how they work in Lightwave, but have been held back by lack of API.

    Open Sourcing Blender would quite likely see projects like Cal3D (realtime skeleltal animation) more able to take advantage of a 'real' GUI 3D modeller/animation toolkit. Similarly, projects like Crystal Space, WorldForge and other large game/engine projects will get a huge boost by being able to standardise on a single modelling/animation environment without having to reinvent the wheel.

    And who knows, open sourcing blender might even get 'Undo' added to it's feature set.

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