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Canonical Offering Blender Support

• ffffraudci 5y ago
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• ognarb 5y ago
  This is interesting. Does it means that Canonical will now employs one or more Blender developers?
  • siver_john 5y ago
    From reading the press release. It appears as if Canonical will just handle support contracts with external companies. Basically they will have a help desk or something if those companies/their employees are having issues with Blender. Part of the proceeds from those contracts will then be passed to Blender for it's further development and to fix bugs that may arise in LTS releases of Blender. I do not believe they are hiring developers it looks more like Blender is out sourcing technical support to Canonical with a bit of a kick back. Seems like a good partnership to me imho, granted I've never worked with Canonical's support.
    • indigochill 5y ago
      fwiw, one time I went to their jobs page and it was down. I filed a ticket on their Github repo and was able to follow every single step of the resolution in public. They also were quick to fix it. I don't know if that's indicative of the typical support contract experience with them, but would happily repeat the experience.
    • mrintegrity 5y ago
      my only experience of canonical the company was when one of their technical consultants showed up to a meeting, opened his laptop and it was running windows. Bit disappointing really! Was a few years ago tho
      • sangnoir 5y ago
        To be fair, Canonical partnered with Microsoft to make Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Perhaps the consultant was running Ubuntu (on Windows).
  • kyrofa 5y ago
    Given my experience with similar products at Canonical, they will probably employ folks familiar with Blender, maybe even engineers who can fix bugs here and there, but those developers will not be spending their days working on upstream Blender. They will essentially be maintaining a Canonical fork of Blender, with occasional upstreaming of security fixes where it makes sense.
    • padraic7a 5y ago
      Since this appears to be a collaboration with Blender that would be a bit weird.
      • kyrofa 5y ago
        Not really, like I said this isn't the first time Canonical has done stuff like this. They both make money from it-- for the most part, that's the collaboration. Don't read evil intentions into the word "fork", it's really the only way Canonical can promise any sort of support. They won't be developing the fork to compete with Blender, they'll just be supporting it and maintaining it. Trying to do that in a place where you have no commit authority would be impossible.
        • taeric 5y ago
          Would probably be more palatable to say they are maintaining their own branch or release. Yes, it is the same thing, but there is a bit off implied intent with the word fork.
          • kyrofa 5y ago
            shrug sure.
            • taeric 5y ago
              Fair. And I fully cede that insisting on other words here is silly. I had meant my post mostly as a question, but forgot the right punctuation.
• Brendinooo 5y ago
  Interesting. Has Blender made inroads in pro cinema/gaming, and are those people using Linux? Seems like Canonical thinks it can capitalize on Blender's success.
  • siver_john 5y ago
    I think I saw in a podcast with someone from the anime industry that it is being used for digital animation by some people there. So I definitely believe it is making inroads. NVIDIA has also included it into omniverse as a first class citizen with other more "enterprise" applications. So I would definitely say it has traction. I do not believe a vast majority of those people are using Linux however, or at least I haven't seen any indication of it. (But maybe some companies render servers do and maybe Blender is useful for that, but like Maya works on Linux iirc)
    • FlashBlaze 5y ago
      Can you specify which Podcast? Would love to hear this episode.
      • oDot 5y ago
        Seconded
        • siver_john 5y ago
          I have fulfilled my responsibility (in the parent) just in case this is easier to see.
      • siver_john 5y ago
        If you're still curious, the podcast is Trash Taste which is a bunch of friends talking about their lives really but they had an animator on their for an episode[0], the entirety of the podcast is 2 hours long and the mention of blender is fairly short. I was trying to find a clip because they do that of their own shows, however I found a tweet [1] in looking by the guest. It may still be an interesting one to watch and two of the members Joey (theanimeman) and Garnt (Gigguk) have done tours of anime studios (CloverWorks and JC Staff respectively). Edit: If Twitter wouldn't have wigged out on me I would have found the link to the clip I was searching for, it was mentioned in the first tweet in that thread [3]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9ulkFRXkvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9ulkFRXkvQ [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/kenarto/status/1363862140323467264?lang=en https://mobile.twitter.com/kenarto/status/136386214032346726... [3]https://t.co/4fq6LRvHmr?amp=1 https://t.co/4fq6LRvHmr?amp=1
• black_puppydog 5y ago
  The canonical website [0] has this paragraph: > The support offering will include Blender LTS releases > across Linux distributions, Microsoft Windows, and macOS. > Canonical’s engineers will engage directly with customers > to provide comprehensive technical support to users by > understanding, diagnosing and resolving issues as swiftly > as possible. Canonical will manage the entire support > process including integration with Blender’s support > infrastructure. It reads to me mostly like customer support, but if their contract specifically says they'll provide "long term security maintenance" as stated in the article, then I guess they'll have to engage directly by providing the security patches? At least if the blender team themselves don't have the time/inclination to do so, Canonical wouldn't really have much of a choice. [0]: https://ubuntu.com/blog/blender-support-from-canonical https://ubuntu.com/blog/blender-support-from-canonical
• thebeardisred 5y ago
  Many years out of date (but from experience working with animation teams), Blender and other modeling tools were used by "creative" teams. They would build assets like the canonical version of the eponymous character for the production. _Animators_ would then write the algorithms to animate said models within the studios chosen engine. For smaller studios this looks vaguely like integration on a service bus. At larger studios this would look more like "team X who writes a particle effects library which is then used to create snow" or "team Y who is making a kinematics extension and to inject the hundreds of slight nuances when a character jumps" (then a poser has tools to say "take Dinkey Donkey, move him from (x y,z) to (x',y',z') and have him jump". Animation in video and gaming often looks like software development at this point (library management, shared objects, compiling frames, linking them into a video, etc).
  • mottosso 5y ago
    I don’t know what kind of animation teams you’ve been working with, but animators do not write algorithms xD
    • an_opabinia 5y ago
      Someone in the character animation department might not even spend most of their day at the computer. They’re more like a combination actor and assistant director than a technical department guy.
  • iamcurious 5y ago
    This sounds fascinating. Can you share articles to know more?
• typeformer 5y ago
  This is awesome
• kyrofa 5y ago
  > Canonical agrees on building and maintaining their own Blender services organization, based on their trusted Ubuntu Advanced platform. The article is probably intending to say "Ubuntu Advantage"[1] there. "Ubuntu Advanced" is not a thing as far as I'm aware. [1]: https://ubuntu.com/advantage https://ubuntu.com/advantage
• maddyboo 5y ago
  What would this type of support encompass? Is it limited to things like “Blender is crashing with this file, please help”, or would it include things like “this particle system is using all of my memory, am I doing something wrong”?
• hal_1337 5y ago
  For those wondering what happens to bug reports (Note: I suspect that 90% of what they'll do will just be general help and support e.g. "why does X not work?"): There were some questions from BF devs on this as well. "Do their bugs get priority? or do they do any fixing?" Ton stated in a discussion on blender.chat [0] that Canonical will file bug reports just like everyone else on developer.blender.org (though the quality of those reports will probably be very high). Additionally, their partnership with the Blender Foundation also means that they will funnel parts of their income through the program back into the Blender Development Fund [1]. So then the Foundation can hire more developers working on the bug tracker to tackle the additional reports coming in. Quite a nice dynamic going on here imo. We'll see how it turns out in practice. [0]: https://blender.chat https://blender.chat [1]: https://fund.blender.org https://fund.blender.org