[Blender Market] Your opinion

Personally I feel ambigous about this.

I think the Blender Market is a great initiative.
I’ve personally paid (a small amount) for the development of a Blender feature a long time ago, thanks to the initiative of Olivier Meunier. This feature is now part of the core of Blender.
And any person wanting to invest in an open source software and that has a bit of money to put in it should do it. There is bug bounties, crowdfunding, donations, t-shirts, and many ways to give back.

That said, and since all these addons are available under GPL license, there is no reason that people with no money should not access it. The license authorizes this. Which means, for example, that the BBUG members could each put a bit of money in a basket, and then buy all together with that money any addons they want to share with the rest of the community for free. This is totally legal.

Of course, there might be a conflict here. If for example, you can download the addon for free off of BBUG, while you have to pay for it on CGCookie. We might think that in the end, we would kill CGCookie’s business. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe people who want to support the development of it would go on CGCookie and just sunday amateurs would come to BBUG to test it, but never use it in a commercial context. Or the other way around.

Anyway, this is a choice that has been already made by the use of the license. Anyone wanting to contribute to Blender has to use the GPL, and for that, has to allow their code to be distributed freely.

So it’s not really a question about should CGCookie charge for addons or not, because we can set up quite easily a clone that would distribute all this for free. It’s more about, should the users of Blender invest in the development of their tools. And I guess that’s what CGCookie encourages.