Apple Joins Blender Development Fund • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#211

Post by zucker42 » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 11:06 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #208

ksec wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is especially interesting because Blender is GPLv2. And AFAIK apart from Webkit which for historical reason it is LGPL, all other open source software Apple support are BSD / MIT / Apache. It is also exceptionally rare Apple donate this amount of money to any open source organisation. To the point I would argue this is very non-Apple. There could be some strategic interest for Blender, although I haven't figure…

Once Blender becomes dependent on the money, Apple can make them change the license into anything they want.

Blender has 7 corporate patrons, a long track record of being open source and copyleft, a robust nonprofit structure, and importantly no CLA that I can tell. This comment is just false.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#212

Post by boopmaster » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 11:10 PM UTC

dsizzle wrote: post #76

Kind of funny that the name of the Apple press contact person for this story on Blender is... Bender.

something of a blender bender

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#213

Post by fock » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 11:10 PM UTC

riveducha wrote: post #202

pitaj wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone know a good intro tutorial for using Blender as a video editor like Premier?

I used Blender to edit a bunch of my YouTube videos and can’t really recommend it. (Using Kdenlive now and it’s OK.) Blender’s VSE is too unlike normal editing programs and the performance is bad as well. It makes your workflow more clunky for no gain unless you’re also mixing 3D scenes into your video. There are ambitious proposals to overhaul the VSE so hope might be on the horizon.

I can only recommend Cinelerra. It's much faster and more intuitive than any other thing I've found, everything is keyframeable (...) and some forks found their way into common distros (my one: Fedora). The guy also did some video tuts in 2018 which are awesome!

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#214

Post by yissp » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 11:17 PM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #31

onelovetwo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also helps blender is a competitor to Epic's Unreal

Wait, how so? Isn't Blender a pretty direct competitor to 3D modeling and rendering tools like Maya and 3dsmax? AFAIK you can't directly author 3D models in Unreal, if anything Unreal has a dependency on tools like Blender. There is some competitive overlap, but that seems mostly within the realm of real-time vs. offline render for producing video content?

You can do 3D modeling directly in Unreal, but it's very limited compared to something like Blender.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#215

Post by zucker42 » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 11:22 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #39

mimsee wrote: post #2

> ... Apple has joined the Blender Development Fund as a Patron Member. To find out what "Patron Member" means, it's 120k or more per year[0]. It's the highest corporate tier Blender has. Nice to see Apple supporting open-source. [0]: https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/

This is especially interesting because Blender is GPLv2. And AFAIK apart from Webkit which for historical reason it is LGPL, all other open source software Apple support are BSD / MIT / Apache. It is also exceptionally rare Apple donate this amount of money to any open source organisation. To the point I would argue this is very non-Apple. There could be some strategic interest for Blender, although I haven't figure…

Apple probably doesn't care about the license, they care with how it interacts with their business. It's important to them that system level stuff is permissively licensed because they view it as important to keep their OS software completely closed. Blender OTOH is auxillary to their goals (whether AR/VR, gaming, or something else) so it doesn't matter as much that they can't make it partially proprietary.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#216

Post by zucker42 » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 11:26 PM UTC

The fact that Blender has been so successful has probably done immeasurable good for the graphical art industry. Think about how many students who otherwise couldn't have were able to learn 3D modeling because of the program. I know at least one person who's entering that field after learning Blender in their spare time.

Honestly, I think Blender is one of the most successful open source projects of all time. It's such a good model for how open source can be successful.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#217

Post by geerlingguy » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 11:38 PM UTC

nuclearnice1 wrote: post #166

mhd wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This might be an odd, or unpopular opinion Well, that used to be the mainstream opinion until a few years ago, when a lot of computer education switched to videos. I blame DHH ;)

I blame monetization. You can make more on YouTube.

s/more/anything at all.

Monetizing written content was (and is) crazy hard, comparatively.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#218

Post by mehwoot » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 11:41 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #174

pradn wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to share an amazing experience I recently had. I was looking through TV consoles on Crate & Barrel and found one I liked. I was unsure if it'd be too tall for my room (it's an extra 9 inches of height over my current TV stand, which is actually just a coffee table repurposed.) The listing page had a QR code I could scan with my iPhone. I was taken to a page that asked me for camera permissions and I said yes.…

If everybody used VR headsets all the time, you wouldn't even need a TV console in your room. In fact, you wouldn't need much besides a comfy chair. This whole AR thing is just a transition technology, that will go away with time.

Assuming your life is spent in a virtual world consuming media, that is. For people who want to live in the physical world with maybe a few augmentations here and there, AR could be around forever.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#219

Post by zepto » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 11:42 PM UTC

mhh__ wrote: post #150

zepto wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebKit, Clang, LLVM

Apples builds of Clang and LLVM are not open source by default. Edit: No amount of downvoting makes me wrong, they aren't open source. The AppleClang != Clang trunk

Sure, but that’s deeply misleading since Apple contributes most of their code to trunk. The fact they ship private builds for their own machines is a complete red herring.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#220

Post by sen » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 11:43 PM UTC

artificialLimbs wrote: post #78

cdiamand wrote: post #16

It's great to see Blender get the support. The user numbers seem to be arcing upwards. https://www.blender.org/news/blender-by-the-numbers-2020/ If you've ever had a passing interest in Blender or 3d modeling I recommend checking out the donut tutorial, which is fast becoming the "hello world" of blender - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPrnSACiTJ4 And check out all the donuts - https://www.reddit.com/r/BlenderDough…

I uncomfortably poked at blender a few times over the years until this tut by Imphenzia, which made me comfortable in under 2 hours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jHUY3qoBu8

Imphenzia's channel is an incredible resource, even if you're not into low poly style he's just great at doing tutorials for both Blender and Unity. Plus just watching him do his modeling challenges teaches lots as you see all the little tricks he uses to get through them.