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The Story Of Great Struggle And Near Loss When the Status of Blender as one of Free Software Leaders Was Threatened

June 03, 2024

The paradox of freedom is by no means a new concept, but it is showing itself in most unexpected places, which are unfortunate sometimes and bring chills down the right people's spines when realized. Thus was the story your writer is going to tell in this wonderful piece of writing. Scary! Truly scary, it was! Battle-scars will appear on the protagonist's flesh, after healing from this experience. How utterly idiotic he was! Almost failed due to an error. Due to an expectation and presupposition that was at most erroneous. But still, how lucky. Because through all those struggles a victory was acquired non-the-less.

A short introduction into the subject of this tale, the wonderful representation of the Free Software world, a program capable of many great feats and a program so versatile that it is considered the Emacs of 3D modeling world. And it is non-other, but Blender.

In the world of computerized slaves, hope is shinning though the holes in the fabric. The fabric is put upon the light by those who do not want the simple folk to be able to challenge their status quo. But some poke through that hole. From the large but dim holes like those of Telegram, to the bright but small like those of GNU, there is one that is both bright and large, enough to make everyone see the light of hope. One which is carved out by Blender.

With the rise of resistance against our e-dictators, and subsequent rise of movements for such and such consumer rights. With masses being rightfully outraged by the lack of items that could be easily repaired and or salvaged when they stop working. And with that by the rise of movements of tinkerers and people who like to do it all themselves. Comes a new market for those who can provide software and hardware for those who want to do it themselves. For those who want to repair things. For those who want to tinker. The, so called, 3D printers are very popular. And with them a great necessity arrives with having ability to tell those 3D printers what exactly is expected from them to do. Blender being one such tool, has an edge upon it's competitors by various means. One such mean is that to obtain a working copy of this wonderful piece of software, no payment is required. Another one of those means is that Blender itself is a tinkerer's dream. It is repairable software, by being what they in the industry call "Libre". Pardon my French, in the language of the Great Britain Libre means Freedom. Finally somebody is resisting the e-dictators properly.

In the world where one of the main goals is to liberate the digital frontier Blender is one of those leading the way forward. Which is exactly the kind of thing that is so unfortunate given the circumstances of what happened next.

A chapter which illustrates the journey of our idiotic protagonist Blender Dumbass on the course of preserving Blender's status of being Libre from the villains of this story who are either headed into the opposite direction with ambitions of becoming the e-dictators themselves, or from those who couldn't care less.

It was a depressing evening where Blender Dumbass was clicking around the spidery landscape of the inter-webs, when suddenly an announcement peaked his interest. The developers of Blender decided that it will be more proper for them to remove a large chunk of the functionality people were getting right in the software in the forms of easily enable-able plugins. And move those into a new inter-webs platform, where a simple, pretty and convenient drag-and-drop operation would install any such plugin back into Blender.

Boiling from curiosity Blender Dumbass navigated to the platform in question and started playing with it. But unfortunately for him the simple, pretty and convenient drag-and-drop operation failed miserably, since the web-browser software that he was using had an extension added to it to detect any attempt by the web-page to install and run a restrictive piece of software ( refereed to in the industry as "proprietary JavaScript code" ) and block those attempts. One such program was blocked. And it was the one that facilitates the simple, pretty and convenient drag-and-drop operation. Saddened by this discovery, Blender Dumbass tried simply pressing the button. And unfortunately for him, this operation also required some JavaScript that was potentially non-free.

Having some experience already with navigating the inter-webs with such an extension enabled made our Dumbass aware of possible mistakes or other mishaps that could lead to those kinds of problems. The JavaScript in question could simply lack a proper disclosure of the fact that it was Libre. And therefor the browser extension ( LibreJS ) flagged it, not knowing any better. To sort this out, all Blender Dumbass needed to do is to find one such disclosure. This was Blender's website after all. Core functionality of Blender was removed to it. If the website's JavaScript is not Libre then Blender is less Libre as a result. And therefor there had to be a disclosure like this.

For those of you who don't know, to disclose that a program is Libre, one need to simply add a copyright license to it granting the users of that program four specific freedoms that insure that the user is not being taken advantage of. This license was nowhere to be found. Blender Dumbass navigated to the one place where this license should be regardless, unless the developers are stupid enough to not allow contributions to their projects, the source code repository. And found there that the license was missing there too. What a shame! A Libre project is actually turning into less Libre. It has to be a mistake. It has to be a foresight of some kind. It couldn't be intentional. So Blender Dumbass reported the issue in hopes for it to be resolved.

Meanwhile Blender Dumbass navigated to a different place where various Blender users and developers discussed the implementation of this website. And there he brought up the issue of the missing license.




Few hours have passes as Blender Dumbass was chewing up his nails and shivering from fear as he watched his beloved leader of software freedom moving downhill. Suddenly an answer of some kind was posted by thorn-neverwake


This confirmed his fears. This thorn person didn't care even a little bit about the whole issue. He was absolutely fine with a core part of Blender's functionality being behind a wall of enslavement. How dare he? A quick answer was needed right away, and so Blender Dumbass wrote back:



Meanwhile Blender Dumbass contacted the resistance. The most driven Libre activists on the #fsf:libera.chat IRC chat. And told them about the whole problem. Suddenly more problems kept piling up. The resistance could even access the discussion forum. Some were blocked outright by a nasty protection system that runs proprietary JavaScript. Some were having technical issues signing up and logging into the website. Blender Dumbass was alone. And bullies only started their vicious attacks.

A message came, this time is was josephhansen:



This was a direct attack. An attempt at silencing Blender Dumbass. But it was an error on the side of the bullies. CC-BY-SA or as they say, the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license is not in fact a license that makes software non-free since it does provide the 4 freedoms. So that person was wrong. What followed was a detailed explanation of why he was wrong, why the JavaScript being Libre mattered and steps that they could take to mitigate the issue. Blender Dumbass hoped that before bullies will murder him publicly, the real developers will show up and at least partially agree with him.

But the bullies didn't stop. josephhansen continued his assault of poor Blender Dumbass:


Okay, good point, LibreJS doesn't actually provide security. It only insures that the JavaScript software is Libre. That's all. But it is a derailment of the issue. An attempt to brush it under the rug by focusing on something unimportant. That should not be allowed. So Blender Dumbass wrote back.


Suddenly thorn-neverwake appeared again. Now that is a fight against two enemies that are trying to attack one poor Blender Dumbass.


Here it is, the paradox of Freedom. It always ends up like this. And there is no way to get away from it when Freedom is at stake. Somebody is always going to be there to question Freedom itself by bringing up the Paradox that comes with it. Undermining the entire thing. Making it seem silly and unimportant. What could be done to win this fight? What could be done to get this discussion back to the issue at hand, and not to be about whether the issue matters at all?

Blender Dumbass decided to be loud and clear about the stance:




At this point help from the FSF's IRC chat was coming. People gave up trying to navigate to the website itself. Instead they requested Blender Dumbass to simply forward the discussion from there. Blender Dumbass did it in the best way he could think of, by taking a screenshot.




But bullies didn't stop. thorn-neverwake was very determent at poking fun of Blender Dumbass and his ideals. That he wrote this:




That seemed to be so easily debunked, by slightly agreeing. Blender Dumbass decided to take a shot at it. And try to smooth the conversation by doing both. He wrote:


Suddenly Jvry appeared with his objections:


This was a direct attack on the whole concept. On the whole movement. And on the core activists of that movement. As if to say that trying to achieve anything is by itself a sign of being a fanatic. We are not fanatics enough if we still lose it. Freedom is not a joke and those bullies are laughing at it. More than that, it is a clear example of an Ad Hominem logical fallacy. An attempt to discredit ideas by focusing on the person who is telling them.

Meanwhile at the FSF's IRC people started pointing out that perhaps Blender Dumbass's approach here is too rigid. Maybe there has to be a smarter and more productive way to talk to those people as not to trigger their defense mechanisms. Suddenly Blender Dumbass realized how idiotic this whole thing was in the first place. Of course! There is no question in that the way he spoke to those people was triggering in the worst way. Look at the responses. Look at the attacks. Look at the silliness of all this.

Ace_Dragon came to simply clarify some things:




Then SpookyDoom added this to the discussion:



They were arguing ways to make Blender less protected again enshitification. Wait! What were they arguing? Oh dear god. Those were not mere careless fools. Those were the villains now. Those were the ones that had their ambitions of becoming our e-dictators. And they were there laughing in poor Blender Dumbass's face and arguing on strategies of making Blender more malleable by those who couldn't care less about user's freedoms. There was no way to not trigger them. Triggering them was the necessity now. Something had to be done and it had to be brutal. So Blender Dumbass wrote back:

The chapter in which the aftermaths of this ordeal is being explained and where the reader learns about the victory that took place.

The moderators had enough of this angry conversation. The last message was removed and then whole thing was isolated in it's own place, far away from the rest of the conversation. Blender Dumbass felt defeated. Blender, the leader of freedom in software, the hole in the fabric of darkness through which the light of hope was seen, was getting darker. A chunk of it was becoming proprietary. The villains were winning.

But then the developers showed up.

The bug report was being acknowledged, the issue is finally was worked on. And a few moments later it was confirmed that the website got a license. And not just some license. Not one that would make the villains happy. The license was chosen was proper copyleft. It was the good old GNU General Public License Version 3 or any later version.

The issue was closed, the discussion stopped and the freedom was preserved. The activists were happy. And Blender Dumbass was finally feeling calm and serene. After all the doubts and angry comments, Blender was still the leader of freedom that it was.

Happy Hacking!!!

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