The Limits of Openness?

I've been a long-time fan of the 3D modelling program Blender. No surprise, then, that I've also been delighted to see the Blender Foundation moving into content production to show what the software can do.

Specifically, it has produced a game (Yo! Frankie) and three animated films: Elephants Dream; Big Buck Bunny; and most recently, Sintel. Aside from their aesthetic value, what's interesting about these films is that the content is released under a cc licence.

Here's a fascinating interview with Ton Roosendaal, head of the Blender Institute, leader of Blender development, and producer of Sintel. It's well-worth reading, but there was one section that really caught my eye:

we keep most of our content closed until release. I’m a firm believer in establishing protective creative processes. In contrast to developers — who can function well individually online — an artist really needs daily and in-person feedback and stimulation.

We’ve done this now four times (three films and one game) and it’s amazing how teams grow in due time. But during this process they’re very vulnerable too. If you followed the blog you may have seen that we had quite harsh criticism on posting our progress work. If you’re in the middle of a process, you see the improvements. Online you only see the failures.

The cool thing is that a lot of tests and progress can be followed now perfectly and it suddenly makes more sense I think. Another complex factor for opening up a creative process is that people are also quite inexperienced when they join a project. You want to give them a learning curve and not hear all the time from our audience that it sucks. Not that it was that bad! But one bad criticism can ruin a day.

Those are reasonable, if not killer, arguments. But his last point is pretty inarguable:

One last thing on the “open svn” point: in theory it could work, if we would open up everything 100% from scratch. That then will give an audience a better picture of progress and growth. We did that for our game project and it was suited quite well for it. For film… most of our audience wants to get surprised more, not know the script, the dialogs, the twists. Film is more ‘art’ than games, in that respect.

That's fair: there's no real element of suspense for code, or even games, as he points out. So this suggest for certain projects like these free content films, openness may be something that needs limiting in this way, purely for the end-users' benefit.

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Pre-installed Software: A Better Way

PC BOX BUILDERS are thinking of getting rid of the tradition of stuffing your new PC or laptop with trial software that you don’t really want anyway.

The reason is that some retailers, such as Best Buy, are making a small fortune removing the software and charging punters for the privilege.

Well, how about this: instead of loading PCs with a load of junk that users pay to be removed, why not put on a few, good open source programs: OpenOffice.org, Audacity, the Gimp, Blender? No cost to the manufacturer, no rubbish for the end user. Just a thought....

Could Microsoft's Photosynth Have Been Free Software?

On Linux Journal.

She Gave Me of the Apricot, and I Did Eat

I've written about Blender's Apricot before; now there are some demos to explore.

Blender's Big Buck Bunny

Is out:

As a follow-up to the successful project Orange’s “Elephants Dream”, the Blender Foundation initiated another open movie project. Again a small team (7) of the best 3D artists and developers in the Blender community have been invited to come together to work in Amsterdam from October 2007 until April 2008 on completing a short 3D animation movie. The team members will get a great studio facility and housing in Amsterdam, all travel costs reimbursed, and a fee sufficient to cover all expenses during the period.

The creative concept of “Peach” was completely different as for “Orange”. This time it is “funny and furry”!

The Blender Foundation and Blender community have been the main financiers for Peach. As for the previous open movie, a pre-sale campaign to purchase the DVD set in advance will be organized.

Additional support from sponsors and subsidy funds has been realized as well.

Peach also was the first Open Project hosted by the new Blender Institute in Amsterdam. This will make the project more independent, without much involvement of production partners, and also will ensure continuity.

Is Microsoft Poisoning its Sea of Troubles?

On Open Enterprise blog.

A Peach of an Apricot

I wrote previously about the open source film "Elephants Dream", produced the Blender Foundation. Recently it's been working on Peach:

As a follow-up to the successful project Orange’s “Elephants Dream”, the Blender Foundation will initiate another open movie project. Again a small team of the best 3D artists and developers in the Blender community will be invited to come together to work in Amsterdam from October 2007 until April 2008 on completing a short 3D animation movie. The team members will get a great studio facility and housing in Amsterdam, all travel costs reimbursed, and a fee sufficient to cover all expenses during the period.

But this time, it's going even further:

After Orange and Peach Blender Institute continues with a new open project: Apricot. This time it isn’t a movie but a 3D game!Starting february 1st 2008, a small team of again the best 3D artist and developers will develop a game jointly with the on-line community. The main characters in the game are based on the short 3D animation open movie Peach.

Once again, Blender will lie at the heart of the project, and the intention is to do much more than produce an open game:

The team will work on a cross platform game (at least Linux, Windows, OS X), using Blender for modeling and animation, Crystal Space as 3D engine and delivery platform, and Python for some magic scripting to glue things together. It is not only the purpose to make a compelling 3D game experience, but especially to improve and validate the open source 3D game creation pipeline, with industry-standard conditions.

The last point is important: what open source needs is not a good game, nice as that would be, but a framework for producing hundreds of them. It's great to see Blender and the open source 3D engine Crystal Space stepping up to that challenge.

Beyond a Game

Sixth Floor Labs LLC, a Linux game development company, has launched their business today. Founded by Ethan Glasser-Camp and Carl Li, the company aims to improve Linux's desktop feasibility through the creation of high-quality games. Games are "sold" to the Internet community through the "ransom model" -- for one large payment, the product is released under the GPL and freed forever.

If this reminds you of something, maybe it's this:

The ransom model offered by Sixth Floor Labs follows in the footsteps of the Blender Foundation campaign, which raised 100,000 EUR in seven weeks, and the Free Ryzom ampaign, which raised pledges for 170,000 EUR in twenty-five days.

But this goes far beyond games - or even open source. It's essentially the model that has been proposed for many domains, for example drug development.

Instead of today's creaking system of drugs protected by pharmaceutical patents, one suggestion is to offer a bounty - a big one - for the company that comes up with a solution to a medical problem. Instead of patenting that solution, it is then put into the public domain - rather as Sixth Floor Labs propose doing with their games once the "ransom" has been paid - for anyone to exploit.

We 'Umbly Petition...

One of the novel options for companies introduced by open source is to release moribund apps in the hope that they might come to life again as free software. The two prime examples of this are Netscape Navigator, which begat Mozilla, which begat Firefox (somewhat painfully, it has to be said), and Blender, which begat, well, Blender.

Now those open sourcers are at it again, egging on the company MainConcept to turn over its unwanted MainActor video editing software to The People. Here's a petition for the same:

we, Open Source enthusiasts and non-linear editors, ask that MainConcept release most source code (if not all) of MainActor as Open Source so that the community can continue to support and improve it.

And who knew there was a self-styled group of "non-linear editors"? (Via PenguinWay.)

Bleedin' Wonderful Blender

If you ever had any doubts about how amazingly wonderful the open source modelling package Blender was, take a peep at these highly impressive videos - made available as part of Tufts' opencourseware.

Going on a Blender

Blender has always been one of my favourite open source projects, not least for the inspirational way money was raised by the common folk to make proprietary code open. Similarly, the open film "Elephant's Dream" was a good example of innovative thinking.

Now they're at it again:

As a follow-up to the successful project Orange's "Elephants Dream", the Blender Foundation will initiate another open movie project. Again a couple of the best 3D artists and developers in the Blender community will be invited to come together to work in Amsterdam on completing a short 3D animation movie.

...

As a second open project, the Blender Foundation and Crystal Space community are going to cooperate on organizing an Open Game. This will become possible thanks to the support by the NLGD Conference, the "Nederlandse Game Dagen", the annual conference for the Netherlands game industry.

This project will have as a main target to validate open source for creating professional quality 3d games, with Blender being used as creation and protyping tool and Crystal Space as engine and delivery platform.

All important stuff, because it's taking open source into new areas.

Open Aladdin4D

I've written before about the example of Blender, and how it was freed from its proprietary shackles. Now it seems that another modelling program, Aladdin 4D, may also receive its manumission:

What is Aladdin 4D? It's a powerful, but extremely easy-to-use, 3D modeling, rendering and animation package that includes the 3D tools that you'd expect as well as many unique features like relative time-based animation, an amazingly powerful particle system, and one of the fastest rendering systems on the desktop.

Nova originally purchased Aladdin 4D in the mid-1990s from Adspec, Inc. and then heavily upgraded and modernized to make it even more powerful and easy to use. Aladdin 4D has many advanced tools for professional 3D animation, yet its interface was designed to be easy for anyone to use. The source code for Aladdin 4D was designed to be as portable as possible. Adspec, under contract, once ported Aladdin 4D to the Transputer board and also did a special Intel processor rendering engine. Aladdin 4D has already had it's rendering engine test-compiled (a quick hack job) under Linux, MacOS X and other platforms in the past. The source code is highly standard C source code.

This would be great news. Great, because it reinforces this as a model for expanding open source; great because competition is good; and great because with the rise of virtual worlds (especially open ones), 3D modelling packages are going to become as common as HTML editors.

Ryzom.Org: Going on a Blender

Blender is a fine 3D modelling package, with a remarkable history:

The "Free Blender" campaign sought to raise 100,000 EUR so that the Foundation could buy the rights to the Blender source code and intellectual property and subsequently open source Blender. With an enthusiastic group of volunteers, among them several ex-NaN employees, a fund raising campaign was launched to "Free Blender." To everyone's shock and surprise the campaign reached the 100,000 EUR goal in only seven short weeks. On Sunday Oct 13, 2002, Blender was released to the world under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Blender development continues to this day driven by a team of far flung dedicated volunteers from around the world led by Blender's original creator, Ton Roosendaal.

Now someone is trying the same approach with the MMORPG Ryzom, which needs a helping hand:

Ryzom is an innovative MMORPG, which has been developed since the year 2000 by the independent studio, Nevrax. For the past two years Ryzom has been marketed and sold to gamers, developing a fiercly loyal fanbase. Unfortunately, due to market conditions and other unforseen cirucumstances, a request to begin bankruptcy proceedings has been filed at the commerce tribunal.

Until now, Nevrax has produced Ryzom, as a typical commercial software company. Nevrax, not the players, decide what direction the virtial world of Ryzom takes. We want to turn this model on it's head and give players control over the virtual world their character's inhabit. We want to purchase the source code, game data, and artwork, so that we can further develop it by placing it under a Free Software license.

The Elephant Has Landed

No, not that elephant, this elephant (via LXer).

Blender - Star of the First Open Source Film

Blender is one of the jewels in the open source crown. As its home page puts it:

Blender is the open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback. Available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.

It's a great example of how sophisticated free software can be - if you haven't tried it, I urge you to do so. It's also an uplifing story of how going open source can really give wings to a project.

Now Blender is entering an exciting new phase. A few days ago, the premiere of Elephant's Dream, the first animated film made using Blender, took place.

What's remarkable is not just that this was made entirely with open source software, but also that the film and all the Blender files are being released under a Creative Commons licence - making it perhaps the first open source film.

Given that most commercial animation films are already produced on massive GNU/Linux server farms, it seems likely that some companies, at least, will be tempted to dive even deeper into free software and shift from expensive proprietary systems to Blender. Whether using all this zero-cost, luvvy-duvvy GPL'd software makes them any more sympathetic to people sharing their films for free remains to be seen....