>I would have to release it under GPL which I can't do. You don't have to release it under GPL, just a GPL compatible license, like MIT, BSD etc, what you are

>I would have to release it under GPL which I can't do. You don't have to release it under GPL, just a GPL compatible license, like MIT, BSD etc, what you are talking about is that you won't release the source code at all. >Also Blender is actually a decent core tool, if they allowed companies to develop commercial plugins on top of it via LGPL or something it would (IMO) make the Blender adoption much faster. At the cost of becoming more like an open source 'core' for proprietary commercial plugins... I'm convinced Blender thrives mainly due to being free and fully open source, if you want somewhere to sell your proprierary plugins then just target one of the proprietary 3d solutions. >IMO GPL only makes sense if you plan on making a profit from the code you're releasing by re-licencing for commercial use, I think there are typically two major reasons for choosing GPL, one is of course to bestow end users with certain rights, which incidentally also favours the original developers since they are given those rights should someone modify and distribute modifications of their code, and secondly there is the one you mention where you can develop a fully free open project but also allow a special proprietary license for monetary compensation, this is quite rare AFAIK (but a smart way of letting the original developers get a piece of the pie), and I can only think of x264/x265 right now which does it.