Slashdot Mirror
European Union Contributes To Blender Development
kyknos.org writes "As officially announced yesterday, the European committee has granted 1.9 Million euro funding to Uni-verse. This three-year cooperation project around Verse, a 3d network protocol, intends to develop a networked open source 3D platform which includes collaborative tools, 3D rendering systems and acoustics simulation.
As partner in the Uni-verse consortium, the Blender Foundation has been granted 140.000 euro to finance further professionalizing services at blender.org, and enable long term research and development support for a next generation open source 3D tool. The consortium has been founded by the Stockholm Technical University (KTH), which also employs the original Verse developers Eskil Steenberg and Emil Brink. The other development partners are the Interactive Institute Sweden, the Helsinki University of Technology, the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics and the Blender Foundation. Application testing and content creation will be done by Paregos Mediadesign Sweden and MinusPlus architects in Hungary."
The EU is out contributing to a piece of software that the entire world will benefit from. What's happening in the United States? Well...we have a couple of big corporate interests donating some money. That's about it. Government spending is for promoting overseas use of Microsoft products. Sigh.
The EU is contributing to a project that primarily based in the EU. The Stichting Blender Foundation is based in The Netherlands. An EU country. Therefore, the financial contributions do not leave the EU -- this is a major point.
Certainly, developers / contributors are from all around the world, but it is much easier to justify contributing to the "local" (well at least Euro-based) economy that it is to justify contibuting to a foriegn economy.
Also, although a very cool project, the claim that "the entire world will benefit from [it]" is dubious at best. In the grand scale of things, Blender is totally insignificant.
There are days when the U S of A has an awfully hard time inspiring patriotism in me...
If all it takes for the USA to "inspire patriotism in [you]" is to throw a few thousand at an open source package then 1. you are a cheap vote and 2. look around, there are quite a lot of projects that have been sponsored by the US government which the world now benefits from. The simpliest example is the internet itself.
That said -- this is great news for blender.org!
Hey,
You seem to forget that the US government also contributes to projects by ways of grants.