The Software
Blender is released under the
GNU General Public License
(GPL, or “free software”).
This license grants people a number of freedoms:
- You are free to use Blender, for any purpose
- You are free to distribute Blender
- You can study how Blender works and change it
- You can distribute changed versions of Blender
The GPL strictly aims at protecting these freedoms, requiring everyone to share their modifications when they also share the software in public. That aspect is commonly referred to as
Copyleft
.
The Blender Foundation and its projects on blender.org are committed to preserving Blender as free software.
License details
The source code we develop at blender.org is default being licensed as
GNU GPL Version 2 or later
. Some modules we make are using more permissive licenses, though, for example, the Blender Cycles rendering engine is available as
Apache 2.0
.
Blender also uses many modules or libraries from other projects. For example, Python uses the
Python License
; Bullet uses the
Zlib License
; Libmv uses the
MIT License
; and OSL, a
BSD License
.
All the components that together make Blender are compatible under the newer
GNU GPL Version 3
or later. That is also the license to use for any distribution of Blender binaries.