 Oh, my God, so many people. So, welcome to the 2023 Blender Conference. So, my name is Tom Roosendal. I'm the chairman of Blender Foundation. And today I want to talk about the very important, but boring topic, the GNU General Public License. Or is it called the GNU GPL? Because why? Well, there was one thing remarkable of last year, was that really, literally, everybody starts using Blender. So whether it's big film studios like ILM, DreamWorks, Sony ImageWorks, Animal Logic, the games companies are all using Blender, Gorilla here in Amsterdam, they're using it. The automobile industry for some reason. Every German manufacturer is using it, even in Amerika, Korea, Japan, de userblender. Design companies, architects, film academies. It's really amazing. But, they said, there's one thing holding us back. And that's the legal department. Especially the big ones. Because they say, yeah, yeah, yeah, Blender. Free software, the GNU GPL. This will contaminate our IP. If we start using Blender and we make one little mistake with a piece of Blender code that ends up in our product, we have to make everything we own open source. We have to give everything away. Or maybe everything will become property of the Blender Foundation. And this kind of myths are really being told by lawyers and legal departments. So I let the lawyers talk to lawyers, right? I'm not going to bother you with this. But we do have a lawyer ourselves now, the free Blender Foundation. And if you have a big cooperation in the legal department, connect with me. And I will connect the lawyers together. But for everybody else here, today I want to put an end to this horrible myth of the GPL being viral, right? As if it's an ink blob polluting your beautiful clear water. As if it's a piece of dog poo under your shoe. And you walk around your house and everything starts smelling. Well, it's not, right? This is not true. And to show that, I prepared a little demonstration to get a better metaphor for how open source works. To start with, I want you all to realize that the Gnoed CPL is about copyright. It's all about copyrights. And here is a visualization of your rights, right? This is what you own, your privacy, your data, this is your browsing history. And if you are an artist, or if you are not an artist, it doesn't matter. If you make something, like a nice drawing, let's make something nice drawing here, then this is yours, right? And you put it in the box and say mine, right? You own it, your copyright, that's how it works. Now, for this simulation, I want to expand the context a little bit. This is not my house. This is going to be the company where you work for, the institution, big companies. They hire lots of people, so imagine I'm an employee, I'm working for the company, and I also find a box that is the corporate IP. Here's the copyright from the company. I can still make drawings, right? That's what we do as an artist, we work for companies. And then we say, yes, I made a drawing, but this goes to the corporate box. It's very sad, but that's how it works. In the business, otherwise the company cannot do business anyway, right? This is how things work. Good, so far so good. Inside of companies, you have another box. Here, this is what we call external IP. This is everything the company doesn't belong to. For example, magic trick, a rabbit, a raven rabbit. This is Ubisoft. Of, for example, I find here my good friend, he's a little girl with a frog owned by Disney. It's also not my stuff. Look what's there. See, here there's tools like Maya, or there is Random Man, Photoshop, what is it? So, what can I do with Photoshop? Of course, I make a drawing, something here. And this drawing is my drawing, because Photoshop is still here. And I can give this to the company. And the company can also decide to sell it to other companies. Because in this box is also the IP from your clients. And if you are a sensible business, you don't mix those things up, right? Because that keeps things clear and simple. So far, everybody get it? Because in recent days, another box popped up in businesses, the free software box. So, what's in it? Wow, also kinds of nice tools, right here. Look at that. Crease pencil. So, that's interesting. So, let's see what happens if I make a drawing with it, right? Oh, yeah, so this is super cool. Hey, my drawing. That crease pencil is here. Company can still put it in their IP or sell it to their clients if they wish. So far, so good. This is just three different boxes, three different types of copyright. And the very sensible people will separate these things and don't mix it up. But that's one big difference, right? So, imagine I'm a freelancer and I leave the company, I will work for another company en I'm going to say, hey, I'm going to take my work. Which one? Okay. Oh, maybe I can take my tools, right? That's because I'm not working. But here is this box. This is what? This is my box. So, that's what free software is about. And it's not so much about what's in the boxes. What this is about is what does the copyright holder in turn, the owners of things. The corporation wants to have a box because they want to do business. They want to do servicing. They want to work with clients. So they want to make products and sell it. So they have to make sure that what they own is clear. Here is your clients, right? If you want to make movies, computers or games, and you work with other companies, you make sure that what is here belongs to them. That's in their interest because they want to make money with it. They don't want you to do that. They will make the money. And this thing is public copyright. That's what the free software makes so powerful. It's public copyright. There's a large community of blender contributors that own parts of blender and they say this has to stay free. You can do within the company whatever you want. But what's in here, you can always take it with you and do whatever you like with it. That's the first key difference between the boxes. Now there's another thing and I'm going to make it more interesting because people of course want to mix, right? That's what you have copyrights for. You want to make all kinds of interesting combinations. So look to see what happens if I... If I... If I... If what happens if I take... I have to start digging a little bit here. Maya, right? And I want to have this in my own box. Right? Of course you can't, right? Because this is Autodesk property and you cannot say I want to do anything with Maya what I want. Similar goes for this wonderful piece of blender code I want to... I want to... This copyright is also protected because the blender foundation and the blender community wants to keep this free. You cannot lock it up, the important aspect. The other way around however that is possible. So you can say for example what I did before I have my drawings and I say I give it to the client box. Clients are usually fine with it most of them will say but you have to give us the copyrights. Right? Because we don't accept mixed copyrights now movies will make it way too complicated we want to have your things. So what if you as a business say I have a beautiful brush right? And I want to contribute that to blender. Right? Because it's great. The blender organization will say it is nice we would like to have this brush but we have to accept this to become Kino CPL licensed or compatible. The best thing is you don't have to give up on this. You simply do a little magic trick and you make a copy. And this goes to the orange box and you can keep this yourself and do whatever you want with it. So that's what is possible. Now, for this simulation to work mixing up copyrights has a different way. You cannot put it in the boxes but you can do it outside of the boxes. So you can say well I have in my studio another tool and I get this is RenderMan I get something for myself this is my software and I got a piece of blender that's not a piece of blender and I want to mix it up and call this my pipeline. That's what you can do. Supposed of course that you pay it for the licenses for other the mariage and stuff but with blender you can give it and mix it and do whatever in the company you want. You can even say well here I'm going to make my own version of blender and I'll give it to everyone in the business. That's another problem. One thing you have to be careful with that is if you take it out again you get license. Because what you need to do is separated but this is what you own this is what you don't own. But you can sell this product to your clients and say well just go to a GitHub or whatever blender.org and get the software you can put it back together and use it how you wish. In that sense the free software gives you also a lot of extra freedom which you cannot do with commercial access. Now let's go to a couple of more practical examples. Email Ja That's my email. Dear blender I've been making this amazing piece of code and I want to sell it as a plugin under my own terms. After all I wrote it. It's mine and I want to make a fur living with my hard work. Needful code from far, far away. Look here, this is my code. Or is it the blender code. That's the problem. How do you define the difference? First of all blender is a C code C++ C++ C++ Python scripts of blender are C code is just a development language that we make things with. That's why Python scripts are blender code. You can also say simply does it need blender to run then it becomes C is it independent like a fluid simulation library or something that you made that doesn't need blender to run then it's yours. But the add-on developers would like to sell things under their own terms. Well, it's not really 100% what they made. So what they have to do is the same thing again. Just separate it up and say well, dear client this is what you can buy from me and here is the free software component and just go to your own place put it back together with how you wish to use it. Next Bill So dear blender, we are a large studio working with other studios a lot. We provide access to our infrastructure and software via a remote connection like VPN. We wish to use a modified blender internally to integrate with pipeline. Our lawyers say that we cannot do that for blender because it would be considered distribution CTO of a streaming, giant incorporated studio in Hollywood. Good. Well, this is the same thing again that's what I demonstrated before. We have this mixed pipeline we put all kinds of things together here and that's what I learned especially in the last SIGGRAPH is that nearly every big studio if they are a member of the Motion Picture Association of America all the studios have to make sure that every computer where even one byte of the movie available is not allowed to be on the internet so there is no internet connection on any workstations or any computer that they are using because they don't want this to be contaminated with other IP and of course they don't want this to leak so everybody is working on movies it does not have internet on the computer and even more what they do nowadays is they make this mix and put it on servers and then they say you provide remote access right? so you got internet connection to the table and then you say okay I am going to use the stuff that is over there provided of course that you made a deal with Autodesk and all the others for Blender, that's not a problem because this is not considered distribution for the Knut-CPL so please streaming people go ahead use Blender last email so, as a pipeline TD I find it really hard to maintain our own version of Blender please the uniform plugin API so we can extend Blender easier from studio format max whatever we get this a lot, right? people think that Blender is difficult and if it would have a plugin API it would be amazing well, let me show you how that looks like first clean up my stuff and I'll show you the plugin version of Blender this is the plugin version of Blender so, that's it smaller leaner, but it doesn't fully work anymore and to make it work you have to plug in the stuff from yourself here and plug in stuff from all kinds of commercial vendors that also have cables hard to the cable in the right box what and this plugin is always difficult to do so here is the plugin version of Blender and for that this latest sentiment is what people call open source this is what corporations like to see and this is free software right? because the difference is that we, the Blender Foundation of the Blender community want to make this box complete everything that is here should allow you to make anything that you ever would dream of so this is your ultimate freedom because it's yours it's mine and it's ours right wow is it the first time I fully do this so I have five more minutes I still have some more slides and I will do that a little bit more on a up tempo because I want to show a couple of highlights of what we did in the last year that's always so cool we have an annual report you can download it on Blender.org it's important for our foundation to be transparent what's interesting to see especially is the money even though in 22 er was still the corona stuff and the industry was collapsing a little bit tech industry was firing people we kept a little bit on the same rate and we are doing actively very good and for that reason we have over 50 people on the contract line this includes development clients, part-timers people that get a little bit of money and it includes people in the Blender headquarters in Amsterdam we had we made a new projects website this is the site for developers to collaborate together we want to do this in the box the Blender concept is that we want to have our own infrastructure not always the best solution but it does keep us free and independent so go to theprojects.blender.org website if you want to be active as a developer we made 3 releases and this is the fantastic software only what we can count we only count people who don't have art we don't have art advertisement we don't even count this we had 20, 30 million people downloading Blender and you can also see the steam and the windows store coming up a little bit we made a film, pet project watch it online there was a talk from the conference about it I'm very happy also about the documentary series the Blender Heights, we already have 3 episodes where you can see the people behind the project how they live, what they do how it works Episode 4 is coming very soon I think next week or the week after that it will be online currently we walk on so many awesome topics this will be also part of the conference I'm not going to bore you with all of it Blender 4 is coming next week really good and project that we keep doing of course that every technology project we keep going on, we want to make much more fun with simulation real time for you ports want we have to become real time controlled by nodes of course and I'm very happy with the progress of the animation 25 project they still have one full year and then it's 25 we can still use animation developers but the team is already making a great progress and I'm sure there is a talk also at the conference where you can get updates on it the Blender Studio the headquarters are updating the whole pipeline section because for us pipeline means free open source software and if you as a studio want to use Blender or other open source we make sure that you with open source software can be fully productive for everything including project management and the whole administration behind that we are working on a new film I think there will be also some snippets visible in this conference this is going to be completely different abstract and artistic very nice Beacon LA so unfortunately this event has been sold out already for like six weeks before and it's horrible I hate it we disappoint so many people we had so many people begging for last minute tickets we had to say so many times no so I hope that now everybody go to the LA event that next year it will be a bit more quiet now we already did make a reservation for this venue for next year but I hope the LA conference will take away a little of the stress here another thing that I want to announce is that we are making December the donation companion month because I remember this slide there is this little thing there it's quite we've got lots of donations from the community but we don't really push this a lot like Wikipedia's doing with flashlights everywhere to remind people to donate and even though this is a lot of money this is like 4% of what people spent on the blender market and that's a little bit something we could do better and I also want this to be solved in a way to keep us independent because it's not good that 70-75% of the income is coming from the corporations and the community should be at the same level so that we are going to try that in December good, yes last year I announced the blender lap initiative to secure the future of blender like what is going to happen in the 30's how are we going to deal with all this stuff with metavers some AI's what is going to happen with computing and creation in the coming decade and if blender wants to stay relevant we have to be ready for that and you can't wait with that because we keep making new versions of blender day to day work keeps going and if we keep doing that in 5 years we might lose it and become obsolete so I would like to have funding looking forward to get a small team of people who are fully independent of rethinking blender rethinking open source creation and make something that can take like 5 years I don't care but that's something that we have a future with blender still so thanks for listening I wish you all a great conference and special thanks to the sponsors