Lack of open source shown as negative part of D on Dr. Dobbs

["Michaël]

On Thursday, 10 May 2012 at 03:35:37 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Wednesday, May 09, 2012 22:15:23 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> On 5/9/12 3:51 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> > Yeah. The lack of open sourceness for the backend is pretty 
>> > much complete
>> > FUD.
>> The problem is, the damage is there and is real. It's like in 
>> those
>> crazy situations - an allegation of harassment still affects a 
>> teacher's
>> career, even if there's a simple explanation. The only answer 
>> to "is it
>> open source?" can be an unqualified "yes".
>
> Well, that's what FUD does. It creates Fear Uncertainty and 
> Doubt without
> being backed by facts. It just creates damage. So, the 
> situation itself
> shouldn't be a problem, but people keep bringing it up anyway, 
> which _does_
> cause us problems.
>
>> I wish we could get rid of this crappy backend situation.
>
> Yeah, but I don't know how. As long as Semantec has the rights 
> to it and won't
> change its license, we don't have much choice - not unless we 
> want to replace
> the whole thing.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

It's a crazy idea I know, but maybe we could, as a community, buy 
the rights from Symantec. Blender was a close-source program 
originally and the open-source community raised money to buy the 
source code from the defunct company that made Blender.