Exocortex Crate (the Alembic suite) goes open source!

[Ben Houston]

Hi all,

I figured you may be interested to know that Exocortex Crate, the
alembic suite for Maya, 3DS Max, Softimage, Arnold and Python just
went open source. You can download it for free and use it for free.
Details here:

http://exocortex.com/blog/exocortex_crate_alembic_goes_open_source

Github repository here:

http://github.com/Exocortex/ExocortexCrate

Best regards,
Ben Houston (Cell: 613-762-4113, Skype: ben.exocortex, Twitter: @exocortexcom)
https://Clara.io - Online 3D Modeling and Rendering

[Lucas Miller]

Nice!  Thanks for sharing.

Lucas

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[Alvaro Castaneda]

That's great Ben

Thanks for sharing!

[Rob Bredow]

This is huge. Thanks Ben for your support of this community since Alembic's earliest distributions.

If everyone on this list doesn't already know, in addition to our launch partners, Exocortex offered some of the first commercial support for Alembic and has really helped the format spread. Exocortex has been particularly valuable for users who didn't have the time or the engineers available to build the project from source. Not to mention Exocortex added Alembic support to applications we never released reference implementations for (notable Softimage and 3dsMax).

One technical licensing note: The Open Source License that Ben chose is GPLv3. That license is not fully compatible with with Alembic's license (New BSD). This is not a complaint and does not mean New BSD is better. It does mean that contributors to Alembic need to keep Exocortex code separate from Alembic code if you want to contribute that back to Alembic. In short, Exocortex code can't be migrated into Alembic.

GPLv3 is a perfectly good Open Source license, and in some ways it advances the Open Source agenda more proactively than New BSD, but it doesn't allow for commercial distribution without source code release. So, GPLv3 has a couple of distribution restrictions that Alembic does not so collectively we need to be careful to respect that. It also means that a commercial application provider who likes the code they see in Exocortex can still do a deal with Ben to license the code directly for distribution in their commercial app without having to open source their whole application.

Thanks again Ben for all your work and contributions to the Alembic community. This is great news.

Sincerely,

Rob

[Tom Price]

I just saw this! , Great news and far fewer headaches all round !

TomP

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[Ben De Luca]

Hey ben, 

        are you planning to release binaries? thank you for sharing though. I hope this is not signifying your moving away from this work?

[Ben Houston]

Hi Ben,

Of course we released binaries, just scroll down to the binaries
section of the read me: https://github.com/Exocortex/ExocortexCrate :)

We are committed to being the project maintainer to ensure other
people's contributions are well and good. But it isn't clear at this
time, how active we can be adding new features if studios using
Exocortex Crate are not willing to sponsor features -- that is a key
question that is still open. I'd like to think the answer is yes, but
time will tell. We are a pure software company so we do need to see
income in some fashion if we are going to be spending significant time
on the project.

I will be straight forward that our recent focus has been our online
3D modeling and rendering service https://Clara.io. It is hard to not
pursue a product (Clara.io) that has gained nearly 90,000 users in
just over a year and has no direct competitors. Clara.io is not yet
mature, but it is getting there.

Best regards,
Ben Houston

Best regards,
Ben Houston (Cell: 613-762-4113, Skype: ben.exocortex, Twitter: @exocortexcom)
https://Clara.io - Online 3D Modeling and Rendering

[Ben Houston]

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the very kind words. It has been and continues to be a
pleasure working with the Alembic team. Professional, productive and
smart. A great combo.

When are you guys going to get nominated for a SciTech Oscar? We know
how widely used Alembic is, thus it shouldn't really be a question of
if, just a matter of when. Should I nominate you guys myself if no
one else has?

Best regards,
Ben Houston

Best regards,
Ben Houston (Cell: 613-762-4113, Skype: ben.exocortex, Twitter: @exocortexcom)
https://Clara.io - Online 3D Modeling and Rendering

[Ben Houston]

Hi all,

We've just updated the license on Exocortex Crate to be basically the
same as Alembic -- thus it is not longer dual GPL3/Commercial:

https://github.com/Exocortex/ExocortexCrate/blob/master/LICENSE.txt

Best regards,
Ben Houston
Best regards,
Ben Houston (Cell: 613-762-4113, Skype: ben.exocortex, Twitter: @exocortexcom)
https://Clara.io - Online 3D Modeling and Rendering