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Blender Is Free Software

code.blender.org

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Re: Blender Is Free Software

#241

Post by zrobotics »

derefr wrote: post #127
asutekku wrote: post #81

When 90% of the plugins and tutorials are available for proprietary software it’s hard to support blender. It also doesn’t help that the UI of the blender is extremely hostile for new users. When other tools are easier to use and have better tooling it’s hard to justify the usage of blender.

> plugins are available for proprietary software I’m genuinely surprised that FOSS projects like Blender (or, for another example, GIMP) don’t offer ABI compatibility to allow the use of plugins made for the specific nonstandard ABIs of popular proprietary systems. Anyone know why they don’t? Is it just a platform thing—e.g. having to support those plugins would mean having to compile winelib into your project?

I would imagine it is due to copyright concerns-see Google's Java API implementation woes. Additionally, the wine devs have very specific rules [0] about who can contribute, ideally they don't want contributions from people who have read the win2k leaked source. And I certainly wouldn't want to give Adobe any reasons to sue me, especially as Blender almost certainly can't afford to fight them in court.

[0] https://wiki.winehq.org/Developer_FAQ#Who_can.27t_contribute...

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#242

Post by didibus »

Does Blender make any money? Are the developers compensated?

I've always had a kind of conflicting perspective, as a developer myself, I enjoy the vibrant exchange of information and source which is open and often free and even "gratis". It has helped me grow and learn, it empowers me to be more productive as I can leverage a lot of existing code. That said, it also often worries me that the culture isn't willing to pay for a lot of these, since being a developer is also my profession. If we get users used to not paying for software, and developers willing to work for free, does it devalue the job of developer?

For example, I often wonder, if there was only proprietary software, would developer salaries be even higher?

Would there be more devs who are small businesses, one to 3 man teams, working on software like grep, 7zip, calendars, todos, calculators, etc. ?

As it seems, open source, especially the licenses which have the side effect of being mostly "gratis" forces the market into offering a service or product which isn't the software itself. Which is why a lot of devs can't make a living of being a small business, we need to be employed by bigger companies who offer collateral products or services.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#243

Post by starbugs »

0815test wrote: post #225
starbugs wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the fact that there is old code in modern Linux distributions suddenly becoming empirical evidence on the viability of a business model? A business model does not become viable because you as the customer are somehow able to work on the project after it is no longer commercially available. By the way: there are a lot of commercial projects having escrow agreements to solve that problem without having to be ope…

> I simply don't buy that we all should be living off donations to support our software development. Most "software development" is internal software that exists simply to solve some organization's bespoke issues, and is not open to the public - FLOSS vs. proprietary is a non-issue there. As far as off-the-shelf, non-internal stuff goes, software maintenance is actually a bigger issue than software development per se…

> Most "software development" is internal software that exists simply to solve some organization's bespoke issues

Do you have a source for this?

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#244

Post by dtf »

sprafa wrote: post #224
module0000 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My kids went wild for Next-Gen, I had no idea it was done in Blender! The graphics are first-class, really impressive stuff. I'm an amateur, but I couldn't tell it apart from other studios such as Pixar.

Blender’s built in tenderer is known to be quite good, but I’m not sure they used it on the movie.

Cycles (Blender's built in path tracer) with some modifications. (Cryptomattes are now in 2.8, and the Embree patch will be integrated somewhere after.)

"Yes, cycles was used for everything, though our version of cycles was modified (with stefan's embree core, and crypto-mattes which were beyond valuable for compositing). The version of blender we used was the studios own dev version (which I believe was using blender 2.78 as it's base?)"

https://www.blendernation.com/2018/08/20/next-gen-blender-pr...

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#245

Post by billfruit »

mungoid wrote: post #42

This argument has been going on for a while, but apparently exploded recently. Im so conflicted about this. I feel like my left brain is fighting my right brain. Or mom and dad are fighting again. On one hand, I have been a huge blender fan for over a decade and personally would give away anything I developed for it. Even if it were high quality. I am all for this way of doing it. Kind of forcing a level playing fiel…

But game mod developers generally do not think of being financially rewarded for mods they are creating for proprietary games.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#246

Post by dtf »

iamcreasy wrote: post #228
hex12648430 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had a presentation at the blender conference about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZn3kCsw5D8 Yes, almost everything is made in blender except for some textures which were painted in Substance Painter and volumetric effects like explosions which were generated in FumeFX and Houdini before being imported, rendered and composited in blender.

That was pretty cool. Thank you! I wish they talked a little more about the difficulties they faced and how they solved them. If I remember correctly Ton Roosendaal once said one of the purposes of the Blender Open Movie project is to showcase the Blender is capable of handling complex large projects. After 4 open movie project it must have matured enough that Tangent Animation was able to solve most of their problem…

A senior lighting artist on the film mentions a few difficulties in the comments below.

- motion blur render times. (They patched Cycles to use Embree as its ray engine to solve this)

- memory consumption

- lack of UDIM

- clunky compositor

https://www.blendernation.com/2018/08/20/next-gen-blender-pr...

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#247

Post by anchpop »

lone_haxx0r wrote: post #236
klez wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is for the recent surge of quasi-open-source license changes some products have gone through. That's why they underline the difference between free software and open source. Recently people started saying that the OSI's Open Source Definition is restrictive and obsolete, that having the sources available is enough, that it's not a problem to restrict usage, etc... That's why it's important to stress "fre…

In a world without intellectual property, source available would equal free software. I think the FSF has tried to squash too many semantic, technical and legal subtleties into the GPL, the words free, libre, etc.

No it wouldn't, for software to be "Free software" it must be GPL-or-other-copyleft-license licensed, which aside from being trivially impossible in a world without intellectual property laws, also has different outcomes than placing the source in the public domain. For example nothing prevents me from taking some public domain code and including it in my closed-source application, but the GPL forbids this.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#248

Post by em-bee »

dahart wrote: post #157
opencl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody recently launched a new site "Blender Depot" which hosts a bunch of Blender add-ons and provides a batch install feature. Some of the add-ons on this site are commercial plugins available for sale by their authors. All Blender plugins have to be GPL so this sort of redistribution is legal but some of these authors have been rather upset about it. So a large argument ensued on the Blender forums about the GPL…

> Some of the add-one on this site are commercial plugins available for sale by their authors. All Blender plugins have to be GPL Just a side-note about the distinctions between open-source, free software, and commercial software. The US government considers any software that has a license and is available to the public “commercial”. So all GNU software in their view is commercial. It’s not a legal distinction of whe…

i noticed the same problem with the use of the term proprietary because that simply means non-standard. there is plenty of non-standard Free Software. and there is also plenty of commercially sold Free Software (RHEL for example)

the only term that i am aware of that really works is non-free.

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#249

Post by em-bee »

tmaly wrote: post #148

I really wanted to try to learn blender for 2d animation. I think the new version in beta needs a few improvements on this front. Its so new that it will take a bit more time to get good tutorials made. That being said, the UI in the beta version is much improved. I am looking forward to getting better at using it.

the next major version is supposed to have a much improved UI

Re: Blender Is Free Software

#250

Post by rolltiide »

dang wrote: post #233
rolltiide wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large backers for open source donations barely exist because their spouses won't let them. People and their foundations barely have complete discretion over their money. So when it comes to donations their spouses want to pretend to be the next Bill and Melinda Gates and drop money into a black hole in Africa than a software tool. More awareness is possible. Different people in Africa contribute to open source too, b…

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait to Hacker News so we don't have to ban you again? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I guess I just wish you guys would break down what you feel is unsubstantive "and/or flamebait". I feel like A LOT of assumptions about a fairly articulate comment are needed to make that conclusion. A quick re-reading I think that you made assumptions about who the spouse is, assumptions about Africa, or maybe misreading the black hole part when the context is Africa. Super meta vicariously offended someone expecting other people to be vicariously offended, while foundation directors and recipients in African countries aren't offended at all?

The real question being: was the comment inaccurate? Can we just discuss that? I know how Foundations and Donor Advised Funds make their decisions, people that aspire to support open source dont have the discretion.

Everytime I ask for clarity I just get immediately shadowbanned like "this guy questioned our authority thats the last straw"

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