Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Buying the rights to proprietary programs to free them

[Erik Moeller]

2016-02-05 7:43 GMT-08:00 Fabio Pesari <fabiop@gnu.org>:
> Yes, I totally forgot about Blender! Or it subconsciously prompted me to
> start this thread; in either case, Blender is arguably one of the best
> free programs around (in several categories) and proof that this
> approach can offer quality software pretty quickly.

I think the fact that Ton Roosendaal, the original developer of
Blender, led this liberation effort and the transformation into a
nonprofit should not be underestimated. This is  a matter of
principled leadership, deep technical knowledge, and deep knowledge of
the social and technical community around Blender.

It would be relatively easy to throw money at closed source projects
that seem worthwhile, only to see the resulting free software whither,
because nobody wants to bother getting through the familiarization,
community building and technical debt cleanup efforts required to
build a vibrant community. A year or two later, you might not even get
working packages for the latest distro anymore because some outdated
library dependency is missing.

That is not to say that I find the idea inherently flawed, far from
it! But I think one would need to identify partners _within_
commercial software efforts who are more interested in joining the
liberation efforts relevant to their software packages than in making
a quick buck. To me, this would seem to be a good criterion to narrow
down the set of possible packages to prioritize.

Warmly,

Erik