Blender Fund Raises EUR18,000 In Three Days

dpm writes:"The Blender foundation looks like it might actually have a chance of raising the EUR 100,000 it needs to buy Blender from the NaN shareholders and make it Open Source. They started fundraising on Thursday, and they already have total pledges of EUR 18,025, with EUR 9,946 actually collected. See the money meter for the current status. If this actually works, what other non-profitable commercial software might we buy cheap and make Open Source? Old video games? Video editing software?"

Comments

I contributed to the Blender fund

[J. J. Ramsey]

Unfortunately, my finances are tight, so I could only give $10. Wah.

OTOH, if all the Slashdotters did the same (Hint! Big Hint! HINT!), the Blender sources could go GPL in a matter of days.

Yes, I am shamelessly trying to get you all to contribute, not only to compensate for my lack of funds, but to help keep a worthy, though ideosyncratic, piece of software from becoming part of the bit bucket of history.

Remember, if Blender isn't freed, it will be left stuck as binary-only software that will never be upgraded, subject to becoming unrunnable as our computers change and evolve.

Please contribute to the free Blender fund!

(HINT! HINT! HINT!)

Re:I hope this doesn't succede too well

[The Cat]

If this succedes too well, it could start a dangerous prescident.

Yeah, it might create a market and jobs.

they saw this as a way to pay off their debts right?

The horror!

Open it up, but say you can't make money off it.

Yeah. Let's all keep our minimum-wage jobs at McCompany. We certainly wouldn't want software to have any *value* or anything, because, well, that might mean someone, somewhere might be making *money* and well, that would mean more jobs, and well, that's just not acceptable.

(Yes, this is exactly what it sounds like)

Re:I hope this doesn't succede too well

[Zathrus]

As usual, an open source drone has spouted business advice that has no relationship to the real world.

They can't give it away for free. It has value. There are investors who paid hard cash for the development of the code and while they now know that they're not going to get it all back, they'd like to recoup some of their costs at least.

Frankly, I suspect they could get more for it in the private market. If anything, they're doing the OS movement a favor by offering it at a discount.

Want public companies to give away their old source? You realize that doing so would result in them being sued by shareholders, right? The principal officers of a company have a legal obligation to the shareholders to maximize stock value. Giving away IP which has value (and if you think it doesn't, then why do you want to look at it in the first place? The mere fact that you have an interest in doing so and building on it indicates that there is indeed value associated with it, regardless of its age) is contrary to that legal requirement and would result in the board being ousted, fined, and jailed.

Private companies are another matter. If they have investors (as NaN did), then the investors would probably like some of their money back. If they don't, well, then they're free to do whatever. I do admire how id Software does business - and frankly, they're very shrewd about it. Open sourcing their old engines not only helps the OSS community, but it also pretty much kills the old engine dead commercially. Yes, you can still license it (for only $10k too, compared to $1M+ previously), but the odds of your client being hacked and cheaters ruining the game is way higher. And the original game becomes pretty much unplayable online except amongst friends - again, cheaters have a free hand with the client once it's open sourced.

I like open source software, and it has its place, but it's not the be-all and end-all of software development, no matter what RMS and his cronies may believe. And whenever I see people spouting bogus information that goes against basic business fundamentals it just shows again and again why open source and Linux in particular continue to have problems becoming mainstream.

Re:I hope this doesn't succede too well

[nhavar]

My understanding was that they already pitched it to the private market and got no takers. This meant that in essence they were going to sit on it until someone made an offer which Ton did. While it might not have been the most lucrative offer it did open up the possibility of future returns to the shareholders above and beyond the initial 100,000 and a way for the company to come back.

While we assume that investors always make smart choices I think we can see from other investments *cough*AOL*cough*T/W*cough* that they don't. Often investors pull out just at the moment a company starts pulling it together or keep throwing money into a company that's gasping it's last breath.

Now there are some savy VC's out there but they usually know when to put more in and when to cut their losses. Other VC's would rather sit on something worth a little, holding out for the big payoff, and in the end getting nothing.

The Blender community has been begging for as long as I know to open source the software not so that it will be free but so that they can contribute to making it better. There are people there willing to put time and effort into the product for free because they love the product and most are more than willing to then see that product sold commercially to fund further success. Open source and commercial success are not necessarily seperate goals.