8 ms·

Back from the Blender Conference

115 points by hiena03 7y ago

nneonneo 7y ago
This 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.
- boudewijnrempt 7y ago
  Well, I didn't want to post click-bait on my blog :-)
zaphar 7y ago
Blender 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.
- boudewijnrempt 7y ago
  You got my point :-)
- lbeltrame 7y ago
  IMO it is however easier than other "desktop" applications, because it has an narrower focus, like Krita. Some applications are easier to focus than others (where usage patterns may vary wildly).
logicalmonster 7y ago
What 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.
- alexis_fr 7y ago
  So, they have invested in marketing. I think early FOSS programmers didn’t value marketing enough, which produced excellent software with difficult adoption. Now, for any software to succeed, a nice UI and good marketing material is the baseline. FOSS that is born since 10 years was much nicer (from Angular to Kibana). It is even visible in security breach: At one point after Heartbleed, there was a discussion on whether security bugs would now require a nice single-use website with graphic artifacts, in order to get heard by developers.
peter_d_sherman 7y ago
Excerpt: "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...
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > about 1,200,000 euros a year, which funds 20 full-time developers Wow not paying them a lot are they.
  - renke1 7y ago
    60k Euros is not that bad. You can live comfortably with that in Europe.
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      I think employing someone has about a 50% overhead, so it's really $30.
      - cma 7y ago
        I'd imagine they aren't paying any cut to recruiters. I guess that leaves real estate, equipment, contractor, and legal/accounting (assuming outsourced) overhead.
AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
Linux 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.
- lbeltrame 7y ago
  > 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".
  - Townley 7y ago
    > a lot of developers, including long time Free Software developers, don't get licensing at all Completely agree; it's a complex part of producing software that people (myself being guilty of this) incorrectly assume they can ignore. > There are legitimate technical reasons for not liking Electron, not necessarily due to "disproportionate amount of time bickering" spent by "Linux Desktop users". There are legitimate technical reasons for not choosing electron, but I can't think of any for not liking it. It's a perfectly fine and useful way to make a cross-platform desktop application. If it doesn't suit your project's purposes because of performance, size, or current acumen, that's fine. But I think OP is referring to "Electron is awful", "I hate Electron", or "Never use Electron" levels of ire that crop up occasionally, which should be exclusively reserved for something that no one should be working in.
danShumway 7y ago
Since the article spends a lot of time talking about Krita, I want to throw some praise its way as well. I moved over to Krita from Clip Studio when I decided to go pure-Linux on all of my computers, not because I thought the software was particularly competitive or good, but because I thought it was the most likely candidate to become competitive and good. Krita still has a lot of rough edges, but I see it on a similar trajectory as Blender. It's very rapidly improving, not just in the sense of adding new features, but in becoming a more stable, reliable product. I was using Blender a lot earlier in its development, and I remembered the comparisons people would make to Maya, and it's just... honestly, it's a little surreal to see it now well on its way to becoming something of an industry standard. Blender used to be really annoying to use, and only niche hobbyists were using it. All things considered, its rise in popularity/quality happened fast. So similarly, I'm very bullish on Krita, and it's very encouraging to see members of that community looking at Blender and taking lessons from its development. Krita is one of the more promising and encouraging OS software projects that I follow.
- ryuukk_ 7y ago
  Krita refused to hear complains about its UI/UX => 0$ Blender fixed problems of UI/UX with brand new UI => ton of new sponsors
- pram 7y ago
  They've done an admirable job on Krita, but I don't feel the same optimism about adoption. There is a social element to these things Krita is severely lacking. Most of the migrations I've seen have been from PS/SAI to CSP. There are a ton of artists creating custom brushes for CSP now, and you can't import them into Krita. If you're in a particular artist community/discord and want help, no one is going to know what you're talking about. That's classic lock-in. CSP and Procreate are the hot tools on the Twitter/Instagram scene right now and I don't see the growth slowing. Krita ATM is unfortunately perceived as an outlier tool, like Medibang or FireAlpaca. It probably isn't an issue to you personally, but those are the factors I see stymying adoption (and to be honest, I have literally never met another artist using Krita)
  - 7y ago
mavhc 7y ago
I installed Blender at the school I work at because it had an MSI installer. Did not install Krita because it did not. If you want it to be the default used in schools, make it as easy to deploy as possible. The gimp fork Glimpse is planning an MSI installer, so that'll be installed soon
- mappu 7y ago
  This is a little bit surprising to me, at $DAYJOB i had some requests for an MSI installer. I knew there's some AD/GPO features or whatever but your level of seriousness here is unexpected. Is it really easier to install compared to an exe installer (say nsis / inno-based)? How so?
  - mavhc 7y ago
    Way easier with the default tools. Companies with money will buy sccm etc. But for those orgs without, MSI or writing a script are the only default options. And scripts are unreliable
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    Imagine the difference between software distributed as a tarball and the binary package. Both totally work, but one is so much easier to deploy in bulk. (This is obviously a very loose analogy, but I think it's roughly correct)
    - mixmastamyk 7y ago
      Exe installers support unattended, headless installs with a command line switch.
      - mavhc 7y ago
        But how you do run that command only once on every computer? Including ones that are currently not in the building, or on.
lima 7y ago
On Linux Desktop funding: companies like Red Hat and Canonical fund much of the development on things like GNOME. The real budget is likely much higher than the article suggest, especially now that Ubuntu fully switched to Gnome.
- freedomben 7y ago
  Yep. Red Hat employs quite a few people who work on Gnome and Gnome apps, as done Canonical. Despite being employees for a company, they are extremely involved in the open source Gnome community. It's an amazing example of GPL success IMHO. Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat but not on Gnome
ReD_CoDE 7y ago
This is the first time I hear Krita but I support all good open-source projects like Blender What I like in Blender, except its invaluable community, is its UX, they follow a good logic in interfaces. If someone is familiar with 3Ds Max or Maya, in less than an hour can understand the whole software and how to work with it even without any help or tutorial However, I'm not in the VFX industry and I'm an architect and Building Information Modeling/Management - BIM technologist, so recently we've started to improve Blender for Digital Built Environment industry, an open-source plugin (interfaces) called BlenderBIM [1] So hope we help Blender and Blender community to speed up its success [1] https://blenderbim.org/ https://blenderbim.org/
- ognarb 7y ago
  This is something I really love with Blender and other Free Software project. You can create new plugins to extends the scope of the project. Btw did you know that the icons in blenderbim.org homepage are icons from the Breeze icons theme developed by the KDE community (the community behind Krita)?
cutchin 7y ago
A minor correction - the article makes a couple of mentions of "Handbrake donation[s]", but I think the author was referring to the donations made to KDE and Gnome by the Handshake project. https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/08/gnome-foundation-receives-400000-from-handshake-org/ https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/08/gnome-foundation-receives...

115 points by hiena03 7y ago

This 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.

boudewijnrempt 7y ago
Well, I didn't want to post click-bait on my blog :-)

zaphar 7y ago

Blender 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.

boudewijnrempt 7y ago
You got my point :-)
lbeltrame 7y ago
IMO it is however easier than other "desktop" applications, because it has an narrower focus, like Krita. Some applications are easier to focus than others (where usage patterns may vary wildly).

logicalmonster 7y ago

What 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.

alexis_fr 7y ago
So, they have invested in marketing. I think early FOSS programmers didn’t value marketing enough, which produced excellent software with difficult adoption. Now, for any software to succeed, a nice UI and good marketing material is the baseline. FOSS that is born since 10 years was much nicer (from Angular to Kibana). It is even visible in security breach: At one point after Heartbleed, there was a discussion on whether security bugs would now require a nice single-use website with graphic artifacts, in order to get heard by developers.

peter_d_sherman 7y ago

Excerpt: "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...

chrisseaton 7y ago
> about 1,200,000 euros a year, which funds 20 full-time developers Wow not paying them a lot are they.
- renke1 7y ago
  60k Euros is not that bad. You can live comfortably with that in Europe.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    I think employing someone has about a 50% overhead, so it's really $30.
    - cma 7y ago
      I'd imagine they aren't paying any cut to recruiters. I guess that leaves real estate, equipment, contractor, and legal/accounting (assuming outsourced) overhead.

AdmiralAsshat 7y ago

Linux 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.

lbeltrame 7y ago
> 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".
- Townley 7y ago
  > a lot of developers, including long time Free Software developers, don't get licensing at all Completely agree; it's a complex part of producing software that people (myself being guilty of this) incorrectly assume they can ignore. > There are legitimate technical reasons for not liking Electron, not necessarily due to "disproportionate amount of time bickering" spent by "Linux Desktop users". There are legitimate technical reasons for not choosing electron, but I can't think of any for not liking it. It's a perfectly fine and useful way to make a cross-platform desktop application. If it doesn't suit your project's purposes because of performance, size, or current acumen, that's fine. But I think OP is referring to "Electron is awful", "I hate Electron", or "Never use Electron" levels of ire that crop up occasionally, which should be exclusively reserved for something that no one should be working in.

danShumway 7y ago

Since the article spends a lot of time talking about Krita, I want to throw some praise its way as well. I moved over to Krita from Clip Studio when I decided to go pure-Linux on all of my computers, not because I thought the software was particularly competitive or good, but because I thought it was the most likely candidate to become competitive and good. Krita still has a lot of rough edges, but I see it on a similar trajectory as Blender. It's very rapidly improving, not just in the sense of adding new features, but in becoming a more stable, reliable product. I was using Blender a lot earlier in its development, and I remembered the comparisons people would make to Maya, and it's just... honestly, it's a little surreal to see it now well on its way to becoming something of an industry standard. Blender used to be really annoying to use, and only niche hobbyists were using it. All things considered, its rise in popularity/quality happened fast. So similarly, I'm very bullish on Krita, and it's very encouraging to see members of that community looking at Blender and taking lessons from its development. Krita is one of the more promising and encouraging OS software projects that I follow.

ryuukk_ 7y ago
Krita refused to hear complains about its UI/UX => 0$ Blender fixed problems of UI/UX with brand new UI => ton of new sponsors
pram 7y ago
They've done an admirable job on Krita, but I don't feel the same optimism about adoption. There is a social element to these things Krita is severely lacking. Most of the migrations I've seen have been from PS/SAI to CSP. There are a ton of artists creating custom brushes for CSP now, and you can't import them into Krita. If you're in a particular artist community/discord and want help, no one is going to know what you're talking about. That's classic lock-in. CSP and Procreate are the hot tools on the Twitter/Instagram scene right now and I don't see the growth slowing. Krita ATM is unfortunately perceived as an outlier tool, like Medibang or FireAlpaca. It probably isn't an issue to you personally, but those are the factors I see stymying adoption (and to be honest, I have literally never met another artist using Krita)
- 7y ago

mavhc 7y ago

I installed Blender at the school I work at because it had an MSI installer. Did not install Krita because it did not. If you want it to be the default used in schools, make it as easy to deploy as possible. The gimp fork Glimpse is planning an MSI installer, so that'll be installed soon

mappu 7y ago
This is a little bit surprising to me, at $DAYJOB i had some requests for an MSI installer. I knew there's some AD/GPO features or whatever but your level of seriousness here is unexpected. Is it really easier to install compared to an exe installer (say nsis / inno-based)? How so?
- mavhc 7y ago
  Way easier with the default tools. Companies with money will buy sccm etc. But for those orgs without, MSI or writing a script are the only default options. And scripts are unreliable
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  Imagine the difference between software distributed as a tarball and the binary package. Both totally work, but one is so much easier to deploy in bulk. (This is obviously a very loose analogy, but I think it's roughly correct)
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    Exe installers support unattended, headless installs with a command line switch.
    - mavhc 7y ago
      But how you do run that command only once on every computer? Including ones that are currently not in the building, or on.

lima 7y ago

On Linux Desktop funding: companies like Red Hat and Canonical fund much of the development on things like GNOME. The real budget is likely much higher than the article suggest, especially now that Ubuntu fully switched to Gnome.

freedomben 7y ago
Yep. Red Hat employs quite a few people who work on Gnome and Gnome apps, as done Canonical. Despite being employees for a company, they are extremely involved in the open source Gnome community. It's an amazing example of GPL success IMHO. Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat but not on Gnome

ReD_CoDE 7y ago

This is the first time I hear Krita but I support all good open-source projects like Blender What I like in Blender, except its invaluable community, is its UX, they follow a good logic in interfaces. If someone is familiar with 3Ds Max or Maya, in less than an hour can understand the whole software and how to work with it even without any help or tutorial However, I'm not in the VFX industry and I'm an architect and Building Information Modeling/Management - BIM technologist, so recently we've started to improve Blender for Digital Built Environment industry, an open-source plugin (interfaces) called BlenderBIM [1] So hope we help Blender and Blender community to speed up its success [1] https://blenderbim.org/ https://blenderbim.org/

ognarb 7y ago
This is something I really love with Blender and other Free Software project. You can create new plugins to extends the scope of the project. Btw did you know that the icons in blenderbim.org homepage are icons from the Breeze icons theme developed by the KDE community (the community behind Krita)?

cutchin 7y ago

A minor correction - the article makes a couple of mentions of "Handbrake donation[s]", but I think the author was referring to the donations made to KDE and Gnome by the Handshake project. https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/08/gnome-foundation-receives-400000-from-handshake-org/ https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/08/gnome-foundation-receives...