Back from the Blender Conference
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Back from the Blender Conference
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Re: Back from the Blender Conference
#2This blog post is much more interesting than the (ambiguous) title might suggest. The blog post is really all about comparing the funding models of Blender with other OSS projects - and aiming to demonstrate that the Blender funding model is successfully creating a valuable piece of OSS. Wrestling with funding is a major challenge for OSS projects, even if they don't believe they require funding.
Re: Back from the Blender Conference
#3Blender is an example of a project that is laser focused on their users. Every aspect of their development is guided by that focus. The Open Movie projects are a way of ensuring that what they work on is something that professionals need. You can what you want about blender but their continuing growth in industry demonstrates that their focus is paying off. They are quite literally closing the gap with tools like Maya at ridiculous speeds.
Re: Back from the Blender Conference
#4This blog post is much more interesting than the (ambiguous) title might suggest. The blog post is really all about comparing the funding models of Blender with other OSS projects - and aiming to demonstrate that the Blender funding model is successfully creating a valuable piece of OSS. Wrestling with funding is a major challenge for OSS projects, even if they don't believe they require funding.
Well, I didn't want to post click-bait on my blog :-)
Re: Back from the Blender Conference
#5Blender is an example of a project that is laser focused on their users. Every aspect of their development is guided by that focus. The Open Movie projects are a way of ensuring that what they work on is something that professionals need. You can what you want about blender but their continuing growth in industry demonstrates that their focus is paying off. They are quite literally closing the gap with tools like May…
You got my point :-)
Re: Back from the Blender Conference
#6What I’ve been impressed with following Blender for a long time is they communicate their development well with their users. They provide demos, give discussions, give example files and videos, and make you realize that the donations are going to something tangible. Other projects don’t do nearly as good of a job with this.
Re: Back from the Blender Conference
#7Excerpt:
"Blender’s development fund currently brings in about 1,200,000 euros a year, which funds 20 full-time developers. That’s not the only source of funding. Blender has about 172 developers in the past year, and 550 over its entire existence, and 64 in the past month, same as LibreOffice. Looking at the last number, it means that there are anyway more volunteer committers in the Blender community than paid developers. Funded development hasn’t eaten the community.
Let’s hazard a guess: Blender has four times the installed base of AutoDesk Maya. This is pretty rough, of course, so ingest with salt.
My thoughts:
These are important non-software aspects of Blender which are critical for acceptance by new users, which is critical to maintain a healthy user base, which should in turn yield a well-community-supported codebase...
In other words, this makes Blender a safe choice in corporate environments where a choice may exist between it and commercial offerings, such as Autodesk's Maya...
Re: Back from the Blender Conference
#8Excerpt: "Blender’s development fund currently brings in about 1,200,000 euros a year, which funds 20 full-time developers. That’s not the only source of funding. Blender has about 172 developers in the past year, and 550 over its entire existence, and 64 in the past month, same as LibreOffice. Looking at the last number, it means that there are anyway more volunteer committers in the Blender community than paid deve…
> about 1,200,000 euros a year, which funds 20 full-time developers
Wow not paying them a lot are they.
Re: Back from the Blender Conference
#9Linux Desktop users do indeed seem to spend a disproportionate amount of time bickering about which popular apps best fulfill their purity tests:
whether the app is "free" enough for their liking (MIT vs GPL-based license, etc),
whether it picked the "right" frontend in the never-ending GTK vs QT battle,
whether it is written in an "acceptable" language (Electron being Satan Incarnate, of course),
whether it has been properly packaged as a DEB/RPM/Snap/Flatpak/AUR/AppImage, etc.
Fail any one of these things, and the app is instantly "unusable" and we should all use ncurses-based obscure-thing-I-found-over-the-weekend-in-some-dude's-PPA.
Meanwhile, an increasing array of "free as in freedom" apps that are widely available and cross-platform (e.g. Blender, VLC, Audacity, Calibre, etc.) serve the larger community by just letting people get shit done, and build up name-recognition as a result.
Re: Back from the Blender Conference
#10Linux Desktop users do indeed seem to spend a disproportionate amount of time bickering about which popular apps best fulfill their purity tests: whether the app is "free" enough for their liking (MIT vs GPL-based license, etc), whether it picked the "right" frontend in the never-ending GTK vs QT battle, whether it is written in an "acceptable" language (Electron being Satan Incarnate, of course), whether it has been…
> whether the app is "free" enough for their liking (MIT vs GPL-based license, etc),
I know it is tangential to this point, but a lot of developers, including long time Free Software developers, don't get licensing at all. While packaging software (FOSS) for a distribution, I've had to poke multiple people to fix licensing problems that invariably occurred (most common: incompatible licensing of parts of a project, perhaps imported from somewhere else).
> whether it is written in an "acceptable" language (Electron being Satan Incarnate, of course)
There are legitimate technical reasons for not liking Electron, not necessarily due to "disproportionate amount of time bickering" spent by "Linux Desktop users".