Facebook joined the Blender Dev Fund
TheMysteryIsThePoint
Posts: 2,960
Facebook joined the Blender Dev Fund to the tune of 120K Euros a year.
Comments
Awesome news. I just hope they have no other involvement. Next thing you know they'll be tracking our mouse movements and showing targeted ads inside Blender. :)
My thoughts exactly. Or attempting to censor our ability to make models they don't like :P
Glad folks are aware out there. Unreal engine also has some far eastern funding that should get our spidey senses tingling.
hm... that means the we will be forced to login with our facebook account into future blender versions
Pretty sure Blender has more funding and developers than Autodesk by now.
Luckily Blenders license is good, if it goes in a commercial direction, forks can always be made. But don't think so, I think the foundation and Ton Roosendaal are good where they are.
Blender tried the commercial route once, it didn't go well. Hopefully they don't try it again.
tip of the iceberg, Tencent probably have a share in every major video game especially MMO's out there
There's lot's of FUD flying back and forth, so I'll try to explain why this really doesn't matter, and provide some proof.
Blender is released under the GPL v2. That means that anyone can get the source code and compile it themselves if they want to. If Facebook has a programmer deep planted in the Blender Foundation (I feel really silly even saying that), anyone can literally see the commit and back it out. And I do mean anyone, even you yourself... it is possible to build Blender with all free tools. People who are thinking something is going to happen, or that something can even happen, don't yet understand the goodness of an Open Source project because they've been abused by proprietary software projects their entire lives.
Another, even more prominent, open source project has already gone through this: Linux. It's resisted some very aggressive attempts by bigger interests than Facebook, and others from before there even was a Facebook and they've updated their development process to better protect themselves, I.e. it is known how to protect open source projects against incredibly rich and contrary interests.
There is nothing to see here, guys. Facebook is probably doing exactly the cost/benefit analysis one is supposed to do before contributing to an open source project: For $120K Euros a year, Facebook is going to get a world class 3D application that does everything they want. In the U.S., that's not even the salary of one senior software developer.
And if you're thinking that Facebook is going to totally subvert the decision-making process about what gets put into Blender, I'd say two things: 1) They didn't have to joing the Blender Foundation in order to do that, they could download the source and develop whatever they wanted, just like anyone else, and 2) So what? What benefits Facebook is probably going to benefit lots of other people as well.
Really, there's nothing to see here.
I would imagine that having some developers from some of these huge corporations taking a look at the code and making suggestions might be a good thing. I doubt that they would get involved in actual Blender development though. If anyone might do that, it would be someone like Pixar.
Or more likely imo Facebook is doing their cost benefit analysis and deciding donating to something free and open source that doesn't spy on everything its users do is way cheaper than an ad campaign and will get them some positive press. Something which is pretty few and far between for them right now
(incidently this is the reason 90% of large corporations do donations)
Sure, that also is likely. The point being that certainly there's no FB conspiracy to take over Blender.
Oh we're definitely in agreement there. And even if there were (which there isn't) All they get with their money is the developers to listen to them and implement some suggestions if the developers feel like it so FB can go "we'd like to track every time someone opens blender and where they are and what they'e wearing" but the BF is under zero obligation to actually implement it. And if they did (which again they wouldn't) well all the code is right there so everyone would know immediately and anyone with some basic knowege could fork it
meanwhile blender has extra funds to potentially hire another coder.