Blender, GPL, and header files -- oh my!

[significant-bit]

Hello,

I'm working on SpaceNavigator support for blender 2.5+, and I'm trying to make it work out of the box this time, without plugins.

I can build fine from my own machine with the driver/framework installed, but others shouldn't have to install a driver for a device they don't have just to build blender.

As this project is GPL licensed, I'm not sure how to approach the header files in your framework. This is handled using RawInput on Windows, so isn't a problem there. Do I need to use a similar low-level interface on the Mac side, or can I copy the 3Dconnexion headers into the blender source tree?

Even with weak linking, would a builder need to have the framework available on their machine?

Thanks a lot,
- Mike

[flomotan]

Hi Mike,

On the Mac, you can use HID Manager if you truly want to avoid using the 3Dconnexion framework. More information is available here http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/ ... n2187.html

If you decide to work with the 3Dconnexion framework, developers and users of blender will need to install our driver. The headers should not be incorporated into blender's source tree.