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And from http://www.sintel.org/download

I found their previous open movie, Sintel, to be a better short in both story and effects, but nevertheless, they did a fine job.

No it isn't. One is the flip side of the other. The toolchains involved are nearly identical. So is the project organization, number and quality of artists involved, social structure, etc etc etc. It's actually easier to enumerate the differences.

From http://www.sintel.org/about/

“Sintel” is an independently produced short film, initiated by the Blender Foundation

In november, the Netherlands Film Fund approved on a substantial subsidy for Sintel, enough to extend the project to 10 months, with possible 1 or 2 extra artist seats in the final months.

With the highly anticipated extra funding from the Amsterdam Cinegrid – also funding a 4k resolution version – Ton finally could extend the team with 5 artists and a developer in March 2010.

I don't see how any of the Blender Foundation productions are comparable.

The only open source game I know of that have money to pay for artists is The Battle for Wesnoth but even they are unlikely to get financial backing from several foundations/institutes.

...there are a few kinds of software that will never be released as free software from day one. One is high-production-value video games, which tend to consist of more cultural works (meshes, textures, scripts, audio) than code...

Never say never. There are already counterexamples. Sintel is a shining example of an open source animation project with AAA production values. The tool chain is open source, the movie itself is under the creative commons license and significant parts of the production assets (the "source code" created by artists) are also available under creative commons. Why would an artist do this? To launch their career, to have fun, because its there, all the same reasons coders do it. And it can pay well too, look at the Humble Bundle. Definitely a growing trend. The amazing thing is, it progressed so far, so fast just with a few Blender movies. Now there is a whole subculture of expert Blender subdivision modelers.

You're going to see Blender having a big influence of game development soon too. Who wants to license Maya for thousands of dollars a seat when Blender does the same job for free? Obviously compelling for indie groups, which are proliferating.

The trend wasn't so clear a couple of years ago, but now it's obvious: the free IP movement is established and growing in media now, just as in software. It's growing rapidly in engineering too, for that matter. Just never say never, especially when you're already wrong.

The Blender showcase film Sintel has all source needed to render it freely available.

Gaming on a PC is becoming more cumbersome every day with useless DRM, and less relevant every day with half-ass console ports. The gaming industry has always been a niche market, and PC gaming is even a smaller niche. While some companies have been very successful in this market, the future of it is dead.

Insightful, but not quite right. It is true as you say that Microsoft's PC gaming hegemony has no future, however Microsoft has inadvertently set the stage for the emergence of a viable open content creation industry. See my upcoming talk at Scale 9x, and see Sintel.

Sintel is the new video by the blender foundation and IMHO is sightly better than big bunny buck.

Heard of Sintel? http://www.sintel.org/

http://www.sintel.org/news/get-blender-graphics-on-35mm-film/

I'm not really seeing what's so extraordinary about this or how it's connected to "open source" outside of some tortured link with Blender.

The "tortured link" with Blender is that it was produced in Blender, as a project initiated by the Blender Foundation to promote Blender, demonstrate what Blender can do, and stimulate Blender development.

The open source angle would be that Blender is open source, and so is every other bit of software used to create the film (GIMP springs to mind).

Read the "About" page.

http://www.sintel.org/sharing/

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