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

Plan B

[quintessent]

...it might actually have a chance of raising the EUR 100,000 it needs to buy Blender from the NaN shareholders...

Of course, if they fail to raise the full amount, they may have to settle for a less expensive one from KitchenAid.

How about BeOS?

[FyRE666]

I know, it'll never happen... but if it could be bought in this way it'd save a lot of projects a lot of time ;-)

I hope this doesn't succede too well

[MBCook]

If this succedes too well, it could start a dangerous prescident. Now I like blender, and I hope they open source it, but I hope that companies don't get the idea that this is an easy way to make a quick buck off software you don't want to deal with any more. For example I'd love to see Windows 3.1 (or even 1.0) opensourced, or other software that no money is made on any more (like Mac OS 7). And I wouldn't mind if MS or Apple did that and said "Look, we'll open it up, GPL, do whatever you want with it, but pay us $5k." But I think we can all agree that while it'd be nice to have alot of old software opened up, we shouldn't have to rase $100,000 to do it for each piece of software (assuming 1 euro == 1 USD like it did a few days ago). Now blender is all that company made correct? And they went out of business and they saw this as a way to pay off their debts right? In this curcumstance, I can see them doing this and asking for so much, but let's not start a president.

PS: If I'm wrong about the circumstances of this, my point is still intact. I wanna see the windows source code, but not if I have to help pay $100,000. ID software has the right idea. Open it up, but say you can't make money off it.

Re:I hope this doesn't succede too well

[Kredal]

They just got my 5 bucks.. does this count as my good deed for the day? (:

I don't even have a clue as to how to make pretty pictures with things like this. Ah well.

Re:I hope this doesn't succede too well

[Psiren]

If every Slashdotter that cared about Open Source does as I did, and eats beans and rice for lunch tomorrow...

God no. Can you imagine the amount of gas 10000 bean-eating nerds can create? We'd wipe the ozone layer out in a second... ;)

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

[johnnyb]

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

*******

Paying for software is not dangerous.

******

but I hope that companies don't get the idea that this is an easy way to make a quick buck off software you don't want to deal with any more.

******

I hope they do get that idea. I would be willing to pitch in money to free up several software packages that vendors probably don't care much about. Free is about Freedom, not price.

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.

Possible issues.

[danamania]

I don't want to sound like a bearer of bad news - and I'm not, just noting an issue that could prevent some projects (given an ideal world where the opensource community can run around buying old software) from being fully usable as open source. One of these affects what would otherwise be a free download from Apple - Mac OS 7.1, and Apple QuickTake driver software.

6.0.8, 7.0 and 7.5.3 are free downloads, but apparently 7.1 isn't, as Apple only licensed, but doesn't -own- the patents to some technologies included, but which were later not used. Similarly, it's apparently Fuji who own the patents to parts of the QuickTake software - meaning ftp.apple.com has an excellent library of older downloadable software, with a few notable exceptions.

Of course - if ten thousand people buy the source to something really fantastic that does contain a few patented bits, it's still a good thing... there's the ability to write-out what can't be freely distributed, and re-write parts that can.

(take all of this post with a grain of salt - I could be full of it)
a grrl & her server

I'm losing it..

[Kredal]

I read it as Bender Fund Raises EUR18,000... Like they were trying to save Futurama or something.

I'll go back to my cave now.

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!)

Eldred vs. Ashcroft

[Rayonic]

Well, if this case succeeds, we might be seeing the first programs fall into the public domain since... well, ever. Correct me if I'm wrong, but has any piece of software ever fallen into the public domain unless specifically put there? It's a damn shame, now that I think about it.

So to heck with buying programs out of copyright prison. Eldred has the right idea in attacking the root of the problem - insanely long copyright extensions! (Of course, that won't necessarily free the code...)

Open Source video editing and such...

[nidhogge242]

This is sort of a long post, and it's nowhere as well structured as it possibly should have been. So if you're not interested in reading about the promotion of democracy and free speech via the Internet, then by all means skip it, but if you do read it all the way through then I think that you will not only find it on-topic as to the article in question, but also to the general slashdotian sense of freedom and the individual's rights.

I could see several points in having a video editing system (complete with sound/dialogue editing and minor FX-functionality) open sourced.

Although I personally own and use licensed copies for all the programs that I use professionally as a film-maker, many of the people from 3:rd world countries that I've worked with have had problems in acquiring such software because of its high cost. And yes, there is always the opportunity to pull down a cracked version from the Internet. But as this is illegal and manufacturers of editing suites generally check that you have a licensed copy of their program after you've released a commercial production (or at least a widely distributed production with your name on it), this becomes a less attractive option.

As you all know, there are millions of people that live under such circumstances that they don't have the privilege of free speech and free elections. One of the big reasons that their situation doesn't change is because of the fact that they have no way of showing it to the rest of the world. Yes, there are documentaries about the horrors that occur everyday in underprivileged countries and CNN shows you thousands upon thousands of pictures every year of a world in flames. However, these documentaries and news-flashes, although possibly well meant, all have one major flaw in common: They are not made by the people that should be telling the story.

The majority of them are produced by, and therefore politically colored by, western media corporations. I'm not trying to say that all such institutions are evil and this is not an anti-corporate post. I am saying though, that such producers generally have the same ultimate goal, which is, as you all know, to make money. Nothing wrong with that, I work hard at doing that myself. But, in the nature of media money-making lies an inherent factor that prevents an actual change in the countries at hand from taking place. And that is the "hot-news" factor. After a couple of days, news about some small civil war or an oppressive dictatorship in a state, that has a name you can't even pronounce, decreases in commercial value. And so the focus of the media-corporation changes and the all that is left of the civil war is a couple of page 9 articles that state some ridiculously high death-toll, in a place that you can vaguely remember hearing about. And yes, I too remember the media-coverage of former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan and so on, and the media-hype there definitely helped bring about a definite change. But these places only make up a tiny portion of all the horrible things that happen.

The people that should be telling the story (namely the people living in the countries in question), so that a more accurate and consistent picture is projected upon the rest of world, simply haven't got the means to do so. And although an open-source video-editing system would only be a small step on a long road, it would without a doubt make a difference. It doesn't need to have all the functionalities of a fully fleshed out editing suite (you'd have a hard time finding machines that could run one in those countries anyway). It only needs to be able to cut sound and dialogue (in an easyily understandable way) so that the native-filmmaker in question can get all the fundamentals of the production right, and then the people with the funky gear (like myself) can prepare it for distribution on the quality-demanding networks of the western world. In fact, if it was open-sourced and by the community made to run on a cheap machine using an open-source O.S, then all the better. Old editing suites that nobody uses anymore (and because of this are cheap to buy) can seldom run on a free O.S.

If you did read this far then thanks for listening. I hope you don't feel that I wasted your time.