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Hollywood will see the commoditization of entertainment blockbusters...

Yeah, right. A bunch of open source enthusiasts will create a blockbuster movie. This is a crowd that can't create a decent set of desktop icons or logos that don't suck.

The tools for creating a good effects movie are available right now. Download Blender. Here's some good work done with Blender.. Unless you have real talent, you'll only be able to make crap with it. Sorry.

Look at YouTube. The Onion's take on YouTube is apt. If YouTube ever gets a plagiarism detection system that works, YouTube will die. Almost all the good content is a copy of something. Taking video is easy. Making a good movie is very hard. Assembling bits of clip art won't cut it.

A few years back, I was talking to a successful Hollywood director about where the technology was going. What he wanted was technology that would allow him to make a major film for about $10 million to $20 million, with a staff of 20-50 people, instead of needing $100 million and the services of over 500 people. We still don't have that. That's the technical challenge.

"Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" was an attempt at a low-budget high-look production. The guy behind that actually tried to make the movie at home on a Mac, over a period of years. Not good enough. (The result can be seen in the "special features" section of the movie's DVD.) Producing the movie for real ultimately cost nearly $100 million, even though it was almost entirely green-screen work.

Hollywood will see the commoditization of entertainment blockbusters...

Yeah, right. A bunch of open source enthusiasts will create a blockbuster movie. This is a crowd that can't create a decent set of desktop icons or logos that don't suck.

The tools for creating a good effects movie are available right now. Download Blender. Here's some good work done with Blender.. Unless you have real talent, you'll only be able to make crap with it. Sorry.

Look at YouTube. The Onion's take on YouTube is apt. If YouTube ever gets a plagiarism detection system that works, YouTube will die. Almost all the good content is a copy of something. Taking video is easy. Making a good movie is very hard. Assembling bits of clip art won't cut it.

A few years back, I was talking to a successful Hollywood director about where the technology was going. What he wanted was technology that would allow him to make a major film for about $10 million to $20 million, with a staff of 20-50 people, instead of needing $100 million and the services of over 500 people. We still don't have that. That's the technical challenge.

"Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" was an attempt at a low-budget high-look production. The guy behind that actually tried to make the movie at home on a Mac, over a period of years. Not good enough. (The result can be seen in the "special features" section of the movie's DVD.) Producing the movie for real ultimately cost nearly $100 million, even though it was almost entirely green-screen work.

Here's a typical bit of Open Source design suckage.

I just installed the latest version of Blender, over an existing installation. The installer can't find the exact version of Python it wants (which, incidentally, is not a currently supported version.) The program itself can, it's just the installer that's broken. Typical.

Now I want to draw a spiral spring. Naturally, that's not built-in; I'll need a third-party plug-in. So I find the Blender Plug-In Repository using Google. That says "The main page for Blender python scripts is now: here. That gets "If you are not redirected within 5 seconds, click here", which then redirects to a dead link.

OK, let's try Blender's main site and search for "plugins". That leads to documentation on how to code a plugin. Another search result returns "Plugin functionalities varies so much that it is not possible to describe them here. Differently than Texture Plugins Sequence Plugins do not have a Buttons in any Button Window, but their parameters are usually accessed via NKEY." Really.

OK, let's just try "blender spiral" in Google. This gets a script for drawing spirals. That's nice. But it's a ".rar" file. That's not something Blender-specific. It's a proprietary Russian archiving format. The RAR site promotes something called "RegistryBooster", which is a strong indication of involvement with hostile code. So I probably don't want to buy the WinRAR product so I can decompress something which is a few lines of Python. This

Typical.

Here's a typical bit of Open Source design suckage.

I just installed the latest version of Blender, over an existing installation. The installer can't find the exact version of Python it wants (which, incidentally, is not a currently supported version.) The program itself can, it's just the installer that's broken. Typical.

Now I want to draw a spiral spring. Naturally, that's not built-in; I'll need a third-party plug-in. So I find the Blender Plug-In Repository using Google. That says "The main page for Blender python scripts is now: here. That gets "If you are not redirected within 5 seconds, click here", which then redirects to a dead link.

OK, let's try Blender's main site and search for "plugins". That leads to documentation on how to code a plugin. Another search result returns "Plugin functionalities varies so much that it is not possible to describe them here. Differently than Texture Plugins Sequence Plugins do not have a Buttons in any Button Window, but their parameters are usually accessed via NKEY." Really.

OK, let's just try "blender spiral" in Google. This gets a script for drawing spirals. That's nice. But it's a ".rar" file. That's not something Blender-specific. It's a proprietary Russian archiving format. The RAR site promotes something called "RegistryBooster", which is a strong indication of involvement with hostile code. So I probably don't want to buy the WinRAR product so I can decompress something which is a few lines of Python. This

Typical.

As long as we're mentioning garage bands and low-budget movies as acceptable stand-ins for, say, the Flaming Lips and the Dark Knight, I thought I may as well mention Big Buck Bunny and Elephants Dream.

Sure, Elephants Dream was a bit odd on the story and acting side, but it was visually impressive. BBB was a standard cartoony short. These were not at Pixar's level, but they were released under a Creative Commons license with all of their sources.

I've been hearing good things about Durian, too.

I just had a flash back from my Newtonian Mechanics class: A Spider lands on the center of a record player rotating at 45rpm's. The Spider attaches a web to the center of the record and begins to walk to the edge of the record looking for a way off. Given the weight of the spider, speed of the record; How far will the spider travel before being thrown off?

I RTFA; but some of the details seemed a little fuzzy, like the density of the outside with respect to the inside of the tube, load bearing. Maybe a 3D Real Time Model could be fashioned in something like Blender3D. If the math proves out, cool. But if not, then maybe the model could be applied to some other similar engineering solution. That in itself would be a worthy engineering accomplishment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_XNA

This is how Microsoft has an identity crisis to trumpet it's "me-tooism" that they're trendy and hip in the world of computing.

Here's some other recursive acronyms to show how dreadfully 'clever & original' the "_________ is not ______" style is.

Personal story: I'm not a coder but the only place I've heard of XNA was from a frat boy dropout who wanted to be a game programmer that wouldn't shut up about it on our WoW ventrilo.
Yet he didn't know what Blender or C++ are.
Hell he couldn't write any LUA mods or tank worth a darn, so he was useless to us.
All he did was misquote EJ forums into every guild discussion and somehow turning it into an argument to show how smart he was.

Yeah we hated that kid.

Interesting to learn of. You might also like blender - http://blender.org/ Blender's modelling, animation, and game engine can be driven using python.

He recommended emailing the guys at Blender, not use Blender necessarily. If they had the time to respond, and if this is a serious project, and would like some assistance in helping keep the project free, the PEOPLE at Blender would be some great advocate to have on your side.

Further, the OP wasn't looking for a NLE, but for the sake of argument Blender has a great NLE. I will agree that Blender is designed with the productive professional in mind that needs GOOD software, not "easy to figure out because I am opposed to reading documentation" software. Blender is worth learning if you are serious about professional multimedia. But just as far as knowing people in FOSS for professional multimedia, that is a different argument.

I think you should set up a very very nice Mac desktop at your headquarters with a few TBs of storage on it and plenty of DDR3 memory. This machine, you should use for editing and processing your video. I am by no means an artist but it's no secret that is a strength of Macs. For storage and capturing, just bring some notebooks with Linux and TB external drives.

You can try Ubuntu Studio if you're interested in giving Linux a shot in the former departments ... start with some base footage and try some stuff out on a Mac and then Ubuntu studio before you make your final decision.

Really, you should shoot an e-mail to the blender folks if you want to keep this documentary purely open source ... you may be able to entice them for a little free support if they can use you as a shining example of open source in the documentary community. It also might be a frustrating pain the ass if you're used to Mac editing tools like every graduate in the arts seems to be.

I think there's other things like GordianKnot (not sure where this project is at right now) and Avidemux that are worth investigating if they aren't already on Ubuntu Studio.

Good luck! I love documentaries, especially independent ones!

Since it's such a successful project, it looks like somebody must pay for the developers... 3D graphics is a fairly specific area that requires not only generic programming knowledge but a fair amount of math. I looked around a little at http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/ but there is no list of donators or sponsors. So, who's paying? If it's about services - what services? Developers are usually not very good at teaching art and writing books.

Read this sort of thing along the lines of: "Since you're now low on dough and high on time, we're giving you our stuff for free so you dare not move to open source in general and Blender in specific to refocus your skills there, because that little Project is closing in on us in leaps and bounds and frankly is scaring the living piss out of us."

I sold my Lightwave 8.5 Licence (+ books 'n stuff) and forfeighted the right for cheap upgrades of this very neat Hollywood Grade 3D Kit because Blender has gotten so good, there are only very few features missing that LW has, and quite a few that LW (or any other closed source kit) doesn't have. Oh, and btw., Blender 2.5 is coming closer with a complete architectural redo that will boost its developement even further. The 3D market is tough as it is and Blender is a scaring thing to watch for SideFX, AutoDesk, NewTek and the likes, you can believe that. The 3D tool market allways was tough, but these days its even more so - wouldn't wanna swap with any of those companies still asking upwards of 3000 Euros for their software.

So perhaps the crux lies in open source game development tools. Blender 3d and AGS are fairly good examples of what I mean. Perhaps a tool similar to Kodu but have it open source instead.

Yes, son, it'll blend. I hear those install distro DVDs blend real well in one of these. :-)

Cheers.

=Smidge=

Because I don't assume that the needs of the users are met. I do graphics work. I've used both the open and closed ecosystems' products. The open ecosystem's products, to be pretty frank, suck.

Have you tried CinePaint? If so what was wrong with it? Then same with Inkscape and Blender? Currently I use OS X Leopard and don't have the resources to buy Photoshop CS for graphics/photography. I tried CinePaint but it only works in X Windows and I wasn't able to get it working so I'm planning to install Ubuntu, then I'll be able to use CinePaint. And the others easier.

If I can't do what I want with them I might buy an older upgradeable version of CS off of eBay. But I want to try open source apps first.

Falcon

The GP Metaarticle is wrong.

1) Frequently, the best and most successfull games our at least their proofs-of-concept don't come from the industry anymore, but from the modding community. In fact, the modding community is such a powerfull force in gaming you *must* play ball with it, if you want to be taken for granted. However, the modders, being passionate freebee providers themselves, have considerably different ethics on some issues. In ways they are even more pragmatic than the OSS vs. FOSS crowd. And they have to be, as they have a completely different goal, which is: Building good games. Duh. Right now, Valve and the Source engine are pulling over quite a few of the modders, for the simple reason that they have one of the best engines.

2) The best people built games primarly because it's their passion, not because they are paid. However, these people want to build games, and not have to dick around with XFree86 crap with problems which, believe it or not, that sorry excuse of an operating system called Windows solved something like 2 decades ago.

3) As with #2, game builders want to build games. They want a working production pipeline. As long as that is virtually non-exsitant on OSS, they won't use OSS. Plain and simple. Cudos to the Blender team for hacking away at this problem one step at a time. However, modders use free versions of Softimage or Maya or UT Editor to build their stuff, and they quite frankly care squat wether it's FOSS or not, as long as it gets the job done.

And last but not least: Good software takes time. From an non-expert end-user standpoint, Linux is barely stopping to suck with Ubuntu 8.10 - and only if you don't want plug-and-play your printer or want to play games that don't run on Wine without a hitch. AFAIAC, Gnome & Nautilus has just stopped sucking a few months ago (I like(d) KDE/KUbuntu much better before) and one-stop zero-fuss printing as in Mac OS X will probably take another year or two until the vendors finally catch on. The very same goes with games.

And lets face it and be realistic: The first thing you want out of the way is your grafics layer, and that has been sucking long enough with XFree86 (Yeah, I know, neat networking, whatever, XFree fanboy, screw you, that's a total non-issue nowadays). Since that appears to be out of the way and desktops are rapidly maturing left, right and center all over the OSS community it is now moving to productivity apps. And AFAICT only now are Evolution and KMail slowly closing in on closed source apps in the field. (Allthough I could be wrong, the KMail crew could still be flat out lying about their ability to provide viable working mail encryption, as they have done for many years).

Once that is all aside and the more complex apps required for multimedia are nearing their true 1.0 release in the OSS community and we finally get a FOSS 3D game engine and a 3D production pipeline that doesn't suck by todays standards, we will see games pop up left right and center as the modding community joins the FOSS fray. And we all will be blown away by the quality they bring to the table. The gaming industry will be hit just as hard as other software fields and will have to adapt with pay-for-content or simular strategies.

Bottom line:
If you want to know how the future of FOSS gaming looks like, check out the modding community. And yes, it's a 120% Windows world right now. And, yes, believe it or not, for its very own very good reasons too. ... (I can't believe I just said that.)

I'm glad that the argument that "they do it for the glory" worked for your dad. But I think in general it is a weak argument that doesn't really explain much and may be mostly fictitious. For instance, the Spread Firefox contingent make a seriously important contribution to the larger Firefox community, but none of them are in it for the glory, or are using programmer's skills for that matter.

[I know I'm preaching to the choir here. Please think about how you might be able to use the following in your efforts to convince those around you that FOSS is an important phenomenon that is significantly reshaping our world. Consider this a part of my contribution back to the open source communities that are giving me so much: Ubuntu, OpenOffice, Blender, Apache, GnuCash, and the list goes on and on...]

Here's a core truth about successful FOSS projects: it really is all about the community.

These projects come together like an Amish community that decides it needs a new meeting house, or an Inuit community that decides it needs a new whaling canoe.

Community members gather to mutually develop a plan, then each contributes a bit of their labor in their free time for the common good. In the Amish community, those with carpentry skills measure the boards and do the hammering; those with lesser skills work the saws and fetch and carry the boards. Others with different skills prepare the meals. Everyone contributes to the building and in a Saturday's time, hundreds of man hours, including that of skilled craftsmen, cause a new meeting house to be raised.

Everyone involved benefits: any member of the community can use the building. No one person owns the result, but everyone involved is wealthier for having access to the new asset. And it all comes together with incredible speed, and (by capitalistic standards) an impossibly low cost of production.

This is a very ancient way of getting big projects done. The internet makes it easy to go back to these ancient ways for software production. The internet makes it possible for worldwide communities to form around different ideas that would benefit everybody (an office suite with fully shareable data files-- OpenOffice.org; a superior 3D modeling and animation package-- Blender; an accounting package that even a mon'n'pop grocery store could afford to use-- GnuCash). Given sufficient interest, a production team of thousands can self-assemble and create in a very short time a piece of complex software that matches or exceeds the quality that any closed shop could afford to produce.

Since there is no cost involved in sharing the results of these community efforts even with people who are outside of the community, it makes sense to just make them completely open for anyone to use. For one thing, it is easier to do that than to come up with any kind of exclusionary scheme. Any more, these products are generally copyrighted by some representative of the community, but the licensing is used to protect the community's long term interests in its jointly owned property, and not as means to play zero sum profit games. The wealth that the community builders wanted is there, and is undiminished by sharing it with everyone. To not so share it would actually be harder to do and would add an impossible cost.

A Christian might see this as a loaves and fishes thing. What would have happened at that assembly if some guy in the middle of the crowd decided that he was not going to hand the basket on unless the fellow next to him paid him a coin or two. Well, the other baskets being passed about would route around him, wouldn't they? And that is what the FOSS concept is turning the world of software into: a gigantic loaves and fishes meeting where nobody is going to go hungry.

[Thank you for reading this rant.]

So mister fuckface. tell me HOW you can with your shitty windows and shitty linux and extra shitty BSD capture, compost and edit a TV show or movie without making it look like a 12 year old did it in his basement.

Ask these guys: http://orange.blender.org/

For example Blender's renderer's scale on a system like this? Of course something like MentalRay might scale easily but has anyone any hands on experience?

One might argue if you are throwing away $25,000 on a system like that you might use software that costs, but then again, Blender has made tremendous progress these last years..

My team is currently leading The Witcher mod competition, and I read through this article thinking 'oh, yes', 'oh, yes', 'oh, yes'. Compared with the very well established Neverwinter Aurora toolkit, D'Jinni, The Witcher toolkit, is very fragile, and very under-documented. And, of course, we're pioneers, so while there are a few people who have already tried some things, we're having to learn a lot through trial and error.

My conclusion? This is the last mod I'll do with closed source tools. D'Jinni produces very polished results - the scenery of The Witcher is breathtaking - but when things don't work we could at least debug and find out why not. So we're looking carefully at The Blender and the Java Monkey Engine.

The video shows the 3D artist using Blender, a free and open source 3D modeling and animation program.

From the video it looks like you can work in Blender. Take a look at the link below for the import/export Blender plugins. http://www.blender.org/download/python-scripts/import-export/

You could use Blender, and if you dislike Blender's interface for modeling, you can at least import a Sketchup model through a third party import script (don't have the link at the moment, sorry) and export as .OBJ, or any other of the many formats Blender supports exporting to.

Programming is a means to an end. Ask him what he wants to program, then determine how to go about that, which may not be a direct route.

For (a really roundabout) example, there's a good chance he's interested in video games. Download Blender and turn him loose on that. Eventually he'll need some Python knowledge to put Blender's game engine to use, and probably want to make textures for his models, so GIMP enters the picture.

The h264 and ogg files play with lots of interruptions in the video (but not the audio). The avi plays smoothly with some tearing.

This cpu is currently OCed to 2363MHz and the avi still shows some tearing. vlc seems to perform slightly better than totem-gstreamer using the latest blob from nvidia.

db

Another example I like is Blender (the open-source 3D modeling platform). Blender was originally a closed-source commercial product. When the company went bankrupt, the creditors agreed to release the code under the GPL for a one-time payment of $100,000. A donation campaign was started and raised the required funds. So now Blender is open-source, and has been extended and enhanced remarkably in the years since its release.

The reason I like this example is it shows that you can get paid to write code that becomes open-source. It also shows that the community is indeed willing to pay for free/open-source software. It's probably too much of a 'gamble' to become a common business model (write software, get people interested in it, state a bounty for its open-source release)... but it's an option more companies should consider when decommissioning software.

The community will pay for open-source, if it's something good.

I remember downloading things from LegalTorrents a while back (at least one year).

If you go to http://beta.legaltorrents.com/, you'll see a lot of items listed with a date. I claim that this is the date the item was uploaded.

It's clearly not the date the item was published; for instance, if you go to http://orange.blender.org/, you'll learn that "Elephants Dream will be shown on the German TV channel 3sat, apparently right about now, 13 August 2006." Note that the elephants dream is tagged with the date of may 11th, 2008.

Note also that Free Culture is date to 2004.

Submitter is wrong, summary is right; "a while now" is probably four years, as I suspect Lawrence Lessig had a guiding hand in the making of LegalTorrents. Also, no works earlier than 2004 could be found be me.

"...ray tracing and rasterization debate"

I don't think there is any debate at all, RayTracing is by far superior, there is just the problem of computing power.

Anyone (perhaps ask the modelers for the games) who deals with 3D software, knows the benefits of RayTracing for simulating reality (Reflections, Ambient Occlusion, Sub-Surface Scattering, etc)

And once computing power reaches that level it will even speed up the process of creating games because you can let the RayTracing take care of shadows, reflections, highlights, etc instead of manually mapping them.

Take a look at anything LightWave, Maya, 3Dsmax, Softimage, Blender, etc spits out of its render engines, or visual effects in recent movies... granted, that's (as stated a few times in the discussion) years away... but, I don't think anyone is arguing against RayTracing.

(-1 Bastard) ...but...whatever, ive been waiting for real-time RayTracing for years even just within my own 3D applications, nevermind games...

Note, I am by no means an Apple/Mac fan. "User" at best; I consider my mac like the rest of my music gear: as an appliance. My primary OS is Linux.

Maybe it's Apple competing with Windows that's somehow gravitationally moved the Mac experience closer to the Windows one, even as Windows has sucked ever closer to Apple's innovations. But it used to be easy for a beginner (or just an "uninformed expert" like me) to "just do it" with a Mac, with a much shallower, barely noticeable learning curve.

I call BS. The changes to OSX haven't been that big in past years---in fact, I've found them to be rather minimal tweaks at best. I recently moved from early 10.3 (on an original mac mini) to the latest 10.5 (on an imac). The changes I notice? The dock looks slightly different and has stacks now. Multiple desktops are builtin. There are probably a few other minor things.

Comparing this to "the windows experience" (which I sometimes must deal with), there are far more things I notice: in OSX, it's obvious and easy to find how to do stuff, especially configuring the system. Everything is in one place. I don't have to hunt through 3 or more different control panels and hope to happen upon the dialog that does what I want. Everything pretty much just works in OSX, and the complexities aren't hidden, they're simply organized in a very accessible fashion.

What we need is a GUI revolution. The iPhone offers one, with its multitouch innovations. As does Nintendo's Wii, with its unconventional new controllers.

I call more BS. There is little "innovative" or "unconventional" in either of these examples. The iPhone is, for the most part, single-touch-oriented with a conventional touchscreen interface. It has pretty graphics and scaling, and there are a few multitouch things you can do (that often work poorly). There is a bit of gesture recognition, which is hardly new. The Wii, likewise, has nothing particularly innovative in its UI. It's almost entirely mouse-like point and click in its interface components and the better games. The few games where it manages to use motion sensing in an "intuitive" fashion, it's anti-innovation: natural mimicry is what the GUI has been about for decades.

I hope Apple will spend the next year "streamlining" MacOS into something more simple and immediately usable, the way Apple has delivered in the past.

OK, so you're bored and you want a flashy new "streamlined" toy that doesn't work like anything else, but somehow magically delivers usability. That's not how it works. There is no magic. If you want a revolutionary, innovative, streamlined UI, go try out blender. It's quite unlike anything else, and once you learn it, it's extremely fast and easy to get things done. And it's got a hell of a learning curve to get there.

If you want something you can use without a lot of effort, it's going to be conventional. Maybe candy-coated so you don't notice so much, but it's going to be as conventional as anything. People are used to mice, clicking on icons and buttons, and menus. The problem is, once people are used to something, getting them to change or accept something new is difficult to impossible.

For what you want, Apple is doing the right thing: releasing new, more polished versions of its OS, with enough new shinies to keep your attention. Unfortunately they haven't talked about them yet, and you're starting to wander, but I'm sure we'll hear about something soon.

I never said it was widely used, I only said you exaggerated how little use it had.

I know Blender isn't as popular right now but that's only because its development was slower than other packages, clearly because proprietary software has money backing up its development.

That said with the past few updates Blender has acquired enough features to rival proprietary software and I see its popularity growing faster and faster with each update. If the Peach project is any indication, Blender has been quite capable for a lot of professional work, and is only becoming more capable by the minute.

Also the only ridicule I have heard of about Blender was regarding its interface and as I've already stated those comments are so over exaggerated that I can't help but believe that those people don't know what they're talking about in the least.

Mystery

The Blender team, unfortunately, is driven exclusively by the concerns of users who are experts in the field, not beginners.
My twelve year old learned to use it.

Its a good thing someone did some beginners tutorials.
http://www.blender.org/education-help/tutorials/

Enjoy,

Hmm for some reason the link to Big Buck Bunny, didn't show up. Also I should mention the blog that showed the development of Big Buck Bunny as it was being created.

Please consider picking up a copy of the Big Buck Bunny DVD it supported a lot of the development that was done for this release. You can see the trailer here.

Or consider preordering Apricot the game that is currently in development that is based on the Big Buck Bunny movie. You can see the development reports here.

Or you can donate here.

Thanks for your support and we hope you enjoy the latest release,

LetterRip

Please consider picking up a copy of the Big Buck Bunny DVD it supported a lot of the development that was done for this release. You can see the trailer here.

Or consider preordering Apricot the game that is currently in development that is based on the Big Buck Bunny movie. You can see the development reports here.

Or you can donate here.

Thanks for your support and we hope you enjoy the latest release,

LetterRip

And if you look at a lot of them they are alpha/beta releases and not the 1.0 that you come to expect with proprietary software though.

What are the 2.5 and 2.6 releases of the Linux kernel then? Or take NeoOffice. While I have version 2.1 it's up to 2.2.3. NeoOffice, neither my version nor the new one is an alpha. I'm not sure about whether either one is a beta or not. My version of Firefox is 2.0.0.6, I don't know what's the current version for Macs. Look at Blender, I have version 2.44.

But there is a difference, the GIMP is not backed by any major corporation

CinePaint is backed by major corporations. It's called FilmGIMP because it's used by movies studios, it started as GIMP but a programmer added capabilities to it that photographers wanted, such as 24 bit colour depths per channel. The maintainers of GIMP did not accept them however some in the movie industry ran with it creating a fork. Here's a list of movie studios and movies that used it, two being Sean Connery's "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" and Tom Cruise's "The Last Samurai".

So you would expect them to be a little less on features, another thing is, the GIMP developers focus on what means the most to them

That's right, businesses give users what they want whereas OS maintainers only do what they want, which takes us back to there being a place for both FOOS and proprietary software.

On the lighter side, you could say that you'd only consider software that was "out of beta" or version 1.0 or greater, but that would leave out most open source projects and commercial "Web 2.0" products....

how about we hear something from blender

Will this do?

I would not touch that with a barge pole. MS XML is an example that they are not moving on that issue, or they would support ODF, not using dirty tactics to force an half-backed non open standard.

They have an history to use one OSS group against another too.

Blender is in a position where we do not depend on any MS backed format, so I think we should be very careful to stay neutral in those areas.

and

Personally I don't see why specific attention should be given to proprietary Microsoft file formats. If they continue to avoid truly open standards and their own file formats provide a sub-optimal experience for Windows users, then it is not the open source community that has a problem imho.

I don't see Microsoft making it easy for Mac, Sun, Linux etc users to use their "file formats, which are not open or not fully open". Any multi platform application which has support for Windows specific file formats is going to end up with a fragmented community as data then becomes platform specific even if the application isn't.

Do we want to help Microsoft lock more users data to their platform, or do we want to encourage Microsoft to truly move towards open standards?

That's just the first two comments.

or another kind of artist, is to share the art, not to make a profit.

This must be why artists seem to resent and completely miss the boat with open licensing. Take a look at projects like PlaneShift where, according to the artists, only the art has value and the code is worthless, therefore worthy to be shared and made available.

I can't tell you how many times I've chatted with artists who feel everything should be free and shared so long as it is not their stuff freely shared. After all, nothing has value unless it is their own.

I am starting to see/read about more artists starting to "get it". Projects like Blender are certainly helping to change their minds. But for now, by in large, I don't artists tend to agree with your position.

Sorry I can't answer your question about finding a good book, as I read all my technical information online. Here's a source for great blender tutorials though:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD

BSOD stands for "Blender Summer of Documentation". It was a Blender/Google Summer of Code/Documentation thing they did a few years ago. It produced the best documentation that Blender has to date.

Try starting with this one:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD/Introduction_to_Modeling

Sorry I can't answer your question about finding a good book, as I read all my technical information online. Here's a source for great blender tutorials though:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD

BSOD stands for "Blender Summer of Documentation". It was a Blender/Google Summer of Code/Documentation thing they did a few years ago. It produced the best documentation that Blender has to date.

Try starting with this one:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD/Introduction_to_Modeling

I often get "Address Not Found" errors when trying to connect to http://www.blender.org/, but often refreshing will work. Are their servers at capacity right now?

I bought (as in paid full price for) most of the games that Loki (remember them) ever ported to Linux. I still play Alpha Centauri sometimes - it still runs on modern Linux (though sadly their port of Civ3 no longer runs - doesn't get on with modern libraries in some way I haven't bothered to diagnose). I bought Neverwinter Nights when it first came out, because it was available in a Linux port (and it still runs very nicely, and yes, I still sometimes play it - mostly user-generated content, too). And I'm one of the only 597 people world-wide who have so far pre-ordered Apricot.

And that's kind of the point.

It costs money to develop commercial games; quite a lot of money. The people who develop them want to sell them. If there were enough Linux users prepared to spend real money on games, we'd have more commercial games. Over the last few weeks I've been playing (and really enjoying) The Witcher. It runs on an updated version of Bioware's Aurora engine, so presumably it wouldn't be hard to port it to Linux. But I don't expect we'll see a Linux port, because Atari, who sell it, clearly don't think enough of us would pay for it. And sadly I think they're probably right.

I've haven't found many open source game projects which are compelling to me. There are plenty of good ideas out there, and half-finished projects. Globulation is quite polished and seems to me quite innovative, and plays well; but it's also quite shallow - you'll enjoy it for a week but you won't still be playing it in a year. Oolite is genuinely good and you might still be playing it in a year - but that's largely because it is a faithful reconstruction of Elite, which is one of the great classics of computer games. Flightgear may be good but it isn't my thing.

To create a new game takes a lot of vision and a lot of work. Until you've done a lot of work it's hard to communicate the vision, so it's hard to recruit people. And even then, too many of the talented people prefer to tinker with some project of their own which they'll never get finished, than co-operate to deliver someone else's vision. I'd like to be wrong on this. But what I see on Freshmeat is lots of 'alpha' and 'beta' projects, and very little that's genuinely playable.

Pre-order an Apricot DVD. They're developing the game on Ubuntu and it is going to help the Blender and Crystal Space open source projects get better.

The only fucking games on communist linsux are lamr puzzles and a yahtzee clone thatcan't fucking randomize properly.

Maybe you've heard of a little game studio called Id Software? Or Epic Games? I'm not even going to mention what works on Wine.

Whie we're at it, where are the professional 3D applications?

Oh, I don't know, Maya? That's off the top of my head -- I don't do 3D professionally.

But while we're at it, why did you bring up games in what is clearly an article about professional graphic design hardware? Or do you actually buy Quadro cards and wonder why your games run like shit?

I am not talkin about the gpl3 shit

Like what? Closest I can think of is blender, which is under the GPLv2. Is that what you're not talking about?

BTW, great initals, Richard stallman=RMS Titanic

Yeah, because that was totally unique to the Titanic. Except it wasn't -- it actually stands for "Royal Mail Ship".

Then you wonder why you can't get a fucking job

I'm doing nicely, thank you.

Never suspected it was the Windows fanbois living in their mother's basements all along, though. Thanks for that, you just made my day.

I have two things to say to you: http://peach.blender.org/ and http://apricot.blender.org/.

Make of them what you will.

I have two things to say to you: http://peach.blender.org/ and http://apricot.blender.org/.

Make of them what you will.

The deeper understanding behind this is that sex isn't supposed an action of gratification for self, but it is a gift of self for the good of the other, and sex is such a profound gift of self (in the body) that through a direct act of God, it has the potential to create another.

However, if the other enjoys your gift, sex for her has now become an act of self-gratification. If self-gratification is a sin (which is completely illogical in itself; "gratification" simply means "satisfaction" or "pleasure" or source of them, so "self-gratification" would be anything you enjoy or get satisfaction from), and sin leads to death (as it does in all Christian dogmas I know of), you're "gift" is actually death in disguise.

The problem is ultimately caused by generations of obsessive-compulsive people claiming their personal hangups, quirks and oddities to be the will of God, and other people then taking them seriously and making theories based on these declarations. Of course the whole thing is a hopeless mess after two thousand years of this.

The ability to be a co-worker with God in His work of creation is a great gift; one that we need to use as is intended.

I'd say that it's the artists, engineers and architechts who come closest to doing God's work. So if this is your desire, get a pen and paper, or Blender if that's your preference, and start practicing.

For example, I don't think you would be too happy if you gave one of your kids a hammer as a gift and they decided to pound on the dog and not nails.

Do you realize that pounding on the dog with a hammer is going to hurt the dog, while conceiving children in a test tube is not going to harm anyone ? And if you do, why did you chose such an example when it isn't analogous with the test-tube baby situation ? Other than trying to associate opposing this doctrine with killing puppies with a hammer, that is ?

Apart from that, any example of the form "Imagine you're God" is unlikely to work, because you are not, in fact, God, and I find it extremely unlikely that you or any other mortal can imagine what it would be like to be God; most such attempts end up descriping a human with superpowers.

There is a project 'The OpenRT Real-Time Ray-Tracing Project' (not so much open despite name, but noncommercial code available) out there, and presumably Blender should be there soon.

CC.