Open Source Exporter Cooperation

It seems like a lot of issues that get brought up in a variety of other topics center around wanting to have a universal format that does what each individual needs (options for WAYS of exporting into collada). That makes total sense. However, expecting the different vendors to cover everything might be a bit of a stretch. This then leads to individual contributions…

At the moment it seems like the only way of contributing is through posting stuff on another section of this forum. That works ok for smaller things (and exporters are relatively small projects…). However, using a patch submission system and/or having volunteer developers could greatly help in getting in all the desired options into the various exporters. Heck, a full blown Open Source project could be started. This could even be done in cooperation with Alias, Discreet et al so things stay more organized and such.

I for one would be interested in helping out with such efforts.

Who’s with me! :smiley:

Adruab

SCEA is exploring different ways to expand the collaborative design activities that are part of the COLLADA project. An open source project is one possibility that is under consideration. That type of decision will not be made until or after GDC 2005 I expect.

COLLADA has a mix of vendor and invidiidual contributors now. Please contact me if you would like to become a COLLADA partner and contribute to the design, documentaiton or implementation of COLLADA.

Thanks!

I’m totally down to participate in an Open Source Software project to develop exporters && similar commonly beneficial utilities. Such an endeavor would make COLLADA generally more useful to developers because (in the event that we need local modifications) we wouldn’t have to worry about adapting && sharing code obtained from the vendor under a presumably more restrictive Copyright license. If such an OSS project was useful, maybe more developers would freely contribute than the vendor would choose to afford to allocate to their version. Maybe the vendors would be displeased to see an open project of code for exporting from their programs though. We shouldn’t piss them off either.

Is there going to be a COLLADA meeting at GDC 2005 which will decide such things or if not then does “until or after GDC” mean decisions are waiting on something else?

-Pip

Just to say that I’m totally for a fully opensource solution for all exporters/importers. If we are to contribute, having a restrictive license is not a solution.
btw what’s the current license for the source code?

btw what’s the current license for the source code?

It is included in each package. Basically almost everything is using the MIT license, which is non restrictive. I think only Alias is using a restrictive license for their contribution, which prevent you to contribute.

If you read the license, you are not even allowed to send bug fixes to Alias if you find those, the only thing you have the right to do is to modify the code for your own usage, but you cannot redristibute to anybody. Interestingly they have just changed the license in their distribution, because we were asking them to remove the redistribution restriction, only to make the license even more restrictive. This is kinda scary.

Just to say that I’m totally for a fully opensource solution for all exporters/importers.

Anyway, which tools are you interested to contribute to, if we were to create an opensource exporter/importer project ?

Don’t forget that 3Dlabs has started a SourceForge project for a COLLADA plugin to OpenSceneGraph. You can follow this link to join that effort.