With the current rapid growth of fundraisers in the Blender community, the Blender Foundation has decided to launch a centralized way to support independent Blender developers by opening the Blender Development Fund.
Ton Roosendaal writes:
In the past few years a couple of developers have started fund-raisers for Blender development projects. There’s nothing against that of course; crowd-funding can be an efficient way for people to support activities. However, such activities can also raise a number of questions and be quite invisible even.
Blender Foundation’s strategy is to keep supporting Blender as a networked and community based development project. That means we have to work with a lot of individuals – ranging from hobbyists to scientists and other professionals. Each should have an equal and fair access to our projects, where contributions are valued purely on quality and practical involvement. It is quite a well known risk for open source projects that – once money and commercial activities get involved – the position and involvement of volunteers becomes more difficult to manage. I really hope we can prevent this, which is why I’m explaining the current strategy here.
Donations are 'subscription based', which means that you'll agree to a monthly donation. You can stop this at any time, but the recurring nature gives the Blender Development Fund much more stability than one-off donations. Donations start at $5/month.
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36 Comments
Finally it's there!
I think it's a good strategy. Development fund is the key to make Blender more and more professionnal. Not only technicaly, but psychologically.
For a lot of compagnies, a software like Blender is not a professionnal tool, just because it's free of charge. With this kind of supporting system, we can say to those compagnies that Blender is Free, but they can officialy pay for it. That's a huge difference for me.
I will support this.
I recall this being discussed here when the opencl compositor work fundraiser was opened. I am glad that an official line has been taken to give donators additional confidence. Thanks to Ton and the BF for otganizing this.
I would suggest that making it subscription based only is too exclusive and that one-off donations should be allowed to accelerate certain projects. I fully understand thatthere is a need for more stability but placing any kind of restrictions on funding amounts and intervals will only serve to deter those who wish to contribute on an ad hoc basis.
That having been said, things are moving in the right direction, just need to open up the options a little. :-)
First you get the money, then you got the power.
Thats basically, how things work on this planet.
An important and needed step for Blender in the right direction.
Cheers :)
I SUPPORT
I don't use paypal because of political reasons. Is there another way of paying via credit card?
I'd be more inclined to support blender's fund raiser if they used bitcoin or Dwolla.
Paypal = white collar criminals
Btw, bitcoin is open source:
http://www.weusecoins.com/
Paypal isn't the best I think. Small donations (probably) will be tooo small for the fund after it pass through PP system.
I will be donating definitely later. Just need to find a good job now :)
Good 3D tools require also hard work and smart brains.
I very welcome this community effort to fund the complex work for developers
as this is giving back to the time they dedicate to this project.
One cannot expect jobs like Cycles etc being done in 2 weeks and always
for free.
All other designers pay for their software and people like Brecht also need to make
money to support them-selfs.
What's up with this PayPal bashing here again? Does this evangelism never stop?
You can send money as a donation - it is secure and transparent.
You always find something to complain about?
This was very needed especially facing the recent surge of fund raisers.
There is nothing wrong with developer driven fund raisers, but i always thought that the blender foundation should have a saying in this, especially if it is not a script, but something that will be merged to trunk eventually.
Also gives the contributors a little more "assurance" about where their their money goes, increasing visibility and making us more likely to contribute.
Good work! I might start donating!
I tried to do a monthly donation and do have a complete and active paypal account. It constantly asks me to add a bank account and I cant select anything else. Also the language is NL. So, currently useless (at least for me from a german account) and not working.
That Deadcyborg game is too scary! And the Donate buttons were n't quite ok.
I agree only to benefit the blender user.Blender have come a long way to be call a toy software,it proof that can be use as professional medium to achieve superior rendering images and animation.My concern it will all this funds raising be milk by the developers?Wow! what an idea for a splash 2.49 a Cow developing blender!
Christian: the PayPal system does weird stuff with detecting languages... I found an option to force it using English only.
Update news: just passed the 30 subscribers, about 250/month now. Thanks!
Blenderpro
Blender 2.49 did not had such advanced modules as Blender 2.5
2.49 was easier to produce as for example it had a rather simple render engine compared to Cycles.
So what do you want Blender remaining where it is or secure funding and thus securing developing
of needed and complicated Blender modules which will after all only make Blender less a toy.
Good strategy. I've been happy to be able to subscribe for a montly rate but I hope it will still be possible to donate for projects such as B Mesh or the refactoring of the Compositor etc...
@ richard burns:
You don't support PayPal for political reasons, but you support credit cards companies? Hahaha! But in all honesty, I think any way you cut it, as long as you're using a money system provided by the government, you can't escape "political" problems. Using PayPal just to communicated a few dollars in donation will not hurt any more than supporting the outright illegal practices of credit card companies. There's really no escaping it, sadly. Just saying.
@ illin:
Bitcoin is not reliable enough as a currency yet. It's too vulnerable to hackers, and it's not widely accepted. I can't pay rent with Bitcoin, for instance. I would imagine these developers couldn't buy the tools and whatever they need for these developments with Bitcoin. Maybe in the future if Bitcoin happens to grow in enough popularity, but no previous attempt at an "alternative currency" has ever succeeded--and for a good reason.
You may not like PayPal, and PayPal may not be perfect (though I've personally haven't experienced any problems with it), but with it comes to a reliable, secure, unified, convertible digital way to express money worldwide, nothing beats PayPal.
Finally ! We're joining in. Thanks Ton.
as per usual this sounds like a wise course of action from the blender foundation :-)
@Brian L. I know that paypal is not the only corrupt company out their but after what they did assisting the silencing of protesters I could no longer do business with them yes politics is everywhere but I don't want my money going towards a company like that
How about ANNUAL subscriptons?
@ Richard Burns
Not exactly sure what you're talking about.
But it quite honestly doesn't matter whether you use another payment method over PayPal, really. You achieve nothing by not using PayPal in protest. The same kind of people behind a PayPal are the same kind of people behind a MasterCard or a Visa. It's futile to make a point by not using their service--you'll just support another likewise company instead, whether it be your bank or your credit card company. They're ALL the same. I say, one might as well simplify life and just use the best available method of global digital payment transactions around towards supporting the Blender Foundation fundraisers.
Sometimes people complaint because they happen to be close to people who happen to think something is uncool.
I think these types of people are dumb and gullible.
if you are just going to complain for the sake of complaining, why don't you just shut up cause you are not helping anyone. You are not the center of the universe.
We don't care about your hangups and whatever.
Why not use flattr (too) for donations?
PayPal happens to be one of the only convenient (to the user) ways to organize a subscription based service, however it will to my knowledge only work with Credit Cards.
If for whatever reason you do not want to use PayPal, or you cannot set up a subscription with PayPal, you can still donate through Bank Wire. Apart from that, there aren't many viable options.
I recommend to set up a way to mark your normal donation as designated for the developer fund, in this case.
There is no reason to turn this into a flame war by being insulting towards people of differing opinions.
This is great news.
Hopefully many members of the community will sign up, I certainly will be.
I think a spot on the front of the Blender page with projects, and news from within the Foundation itself, things like a blog post, or video every week or two about the goings on and what the money is going towards would make this a lot more appealing. It wouldn't have to be in-depth, it could be something like a 2 minute summary of what Brecht, or Campbell have been working on, or the latest happenings i.e. a post about a cool script, or a new developer working on something etcetera.
Basically a way to have an easy accessible news feed just about Blender development, and the application itself, nothing about book reviews, or images or basically anything unrelated.
cekuhnen, thanks for correcting me.I do want blender to be more advance,however it happening too fast! I really meant 2.50 series not 2.49 my bag!
I'd love to do this, maybe there is a way to set-up a monthly donation system that works without PayPal, Visa and Mastercard, all three unfortunately are 100% out of the question for me for political reasons. (For the same reason I could not support the here recently featured Bsurfaces).
Maybe Flatrr in combination with a normal bank account could work...? Thanks!
Donated 100 euro. Will try to do this every year.
[update] Donations work now for me but you have to either have to ensure there is enough balance in you paypal account or have a valid credit card added. Direct bank withdraw (Lastschrift) does not work. I had to reenter my credit card data and everything is fine now.
How can I specifically sponsor Knife and Bevel development? Not using PayPal though. (I would rather walk around naked than have anything to do with PayPal.)
Thanks!
Just started my sponsoring. Good luck team. I hope we can see faster development and more feature complete tool sets come out of this venture.
it's actually 5€/month and not $5/month.