Licensing and Content

[deckerego]

There's an interesing string of posts on the MakeHuman forum discussing how the GPL extends not only to the code written to manage MakeHuman, but the base mesh and targets that are manipluated by Blender. Basically since the bash mesh and targets are GPL any resulting meshes or images generated by MakeHuman must in turn be GPL.

This is an especially interesting discussion from the perspective of CrystalSpace (or other engine) developers since it brings to light the differences (and similarities) of GPL'ing code and content. It appears that the MakeHuman devs are going to need to switch licenses for the base mesh and targets. This could be of particular interest to people wanting to create commercial games from open-source projects.

[deckerego]

The MakeHuman license has changed to allow users to maintain proprietary models if they wish. Check out the announcement for their Winter release.

I think this is an important item to note not only for those who might use MakeHuman for character modelling, but for any OSI-licensed app that might have some part in content creation. From what the FSF said, GPL mesh targets = all resulting content is GPL'd. The change in licenses for MakeHuman avoids this caveat.