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Blender Community Rescues Sources
Christoffer Green writes "Today the Blender funding campaign went through the 100k limit,
sufficient now to pay for the ransom fee needed to make Blender Open
Sourced. The Blender Foundation aims to have the deal signed before
October 1, do a pre-release for donating members only at October 5,
organize a Blender Conference in Amsterdam October 11-12-13, and make
the official CVS release on October 13 for everyone.
This doesn't mean that you should stop donating though. The foundation
still depends on your contributions to cover costs that have been made."
Hopefully this will be a tend of things to come. Esentially this will allow for more users in the future, on more platforms. It even allows the possibility of selling the compiled project with the helpful additions from the OpenSource communitity, with the exception of making sure that the source is still available (under GPL).
-- Never monkey with another Monkey's monkey
And me, been raised in Blender (because I can't afford the "big boys" - sorry, I haven't really done the usual "get the warez if you're a student, buy the program if you do actual work" thing), found the other modellers clumsy, and can't see why people think Blender is "complicated" (yeah, takes a bit to get used to, but after that it's a dream to use). Sort of like when I got raised in GIMP and can't understand a) why people with Photoshop background can't understand GIMP and b) why people regard Photoshop so highly, GIMP sure has better interface (if not that big feature set, though).
So let me repeat: Blender has a wonderful interface once you get the hang of it. Smooth enough for my needs, anyway, and I actually get work done in it. I don't like the renderer, though - I hope the work will start to implement more export formats and/or interfacing with other renderers (Renderman support would be pretty neat).
It's a matter of choice of profession, I suppose. =)
Great question! Viruses? Heh. OK, seriously...:
DVD-Video creation.
From capture to encoding to muxing the bits together with navigation, and burning. There are many such tools available for Windows.
I know `dvdrtools` works at burning pure-data DVD's, but to burn DVD Video you have all these other steps before it, and the toolchain does not exist in Linux.
DVD Video is an area that will lag on Linux for a LOooong time? Why? Because the software comes FREE with DVD-Recorders, so there's an incentive to dual-boot. If you don't like that gratis authoring package, many people will (like it or not) grab DVD Maestro or something, off Gnutella or Kazaa networks.
So there is not enough DVD authoring on Linux: not for commercial packages (if there is even one DVD suite on Linux, it certainly ain't sub-$500), and not for the glory of being the first GPL toolchain. The specs are scarce, development is hard and it's too much for one developer looking to provide us with a solution, no matter how much glory there is in doing so. It's a brutal, team-based development project spanning several domains of expertise.
I'm glad to see this succeed, and I'd like to see this new type of "market" compete with both commercial software, and the pure-free stuff we already enjoy. The competition will give us what we need, and may the best team win!
The ironic thing is, some commercial software actually costs that much! sometimes just for one license. Its amazing how much money people will pay if they think its going to work better (and if their company is writing the cheque :)
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It's very impressive that the community has enough passion the keep blender alive. (I wonder if the Be community would have done the same thing.)
But I was looking at the licensing and it looks as if they are going to offer a dual license setup that's not unlike Trolltech's for Qt.
Given that Trolltech doesn't seem to be doing too bad as a business I was wondering if the community just funded a new money making entity.
Did any of the contributors get any vested interest in Blender itself. If it was only GPL that would be one thing. The fact that the foundation also has a mechanism for making a profit makes me look twice.
I dunno! Say i'm in London/Amsterdam/NYC, where are you? Let's say I'm recording a 'hard to get together' session at 08.00 GMT tomorrow. Where will you be if your software 'shits it' and I need you to help me?
Based on his previous post, I suspect that he will be on the other end of the phone talking to you when that happens. This is, of course, assuming that you have entered into a support contract with him, just like any other support contract that you may require or desire.
One advantage of dealing with someone like him ("If you need me, here is my cell phone number") is that you get to talk to the actual developer who really knows what's going on under the hood. How many times will you get to talk to the person who actually wrote whatever part of, say, MS Windows that is giving you problems when you call their tech support line?
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!