With the recent Epic MegaGrant and Ubisoft joining the Blender Development Fund as a Corporate Gold sponsor, the fund is now at almost € 70,000 per month, or around 14 full-time paid developers. Ton gives a detailed overview of how this money is being spent and alleviates concerns about increased corporate control over the Blender project.
The fund almost doubled in the past months. Read about the activities we will support.
The Blender Development Fund is doing fantastic! Thanks to a lot of new members – but especially the Epic Games MegaGrant – we can almost double the efforts to support Blender development.
This success is thanks to a lot of reasons. First of all, thanks to the fantastic presence of the Blender community online. Then there is an increasing interest in open source by the media industry, there is the highly anticipated Blender 2.80 release, the benefits for members on fund.blender.org, and last (but not least) it’s the result of a carefully built relationship network between the Foundation and the industry in the past years.
OK, enough back patting. Success comes at a price. What’s going to happen next? People expressed concerns about the influence that the industry will have, or how to keep volunteers of the blender.org community on board . This blog post is meant to clarify these challenges.
4 Comments
link is broken on top of the main blendernation page for
"Ubisoft joins Blender Development Fund"
"https://www.blendernation.com/Ubisoft%20joins%20Blender%20Development%20Fund"
Thanks for reporting that! Should be fixed now, can you check?
yes, now it is ok.
Well he never did say how volunteers and weekend coders interest will be kept.
I guess the implied answer from 'success comes at a price' i.e. he isn't worried if they fade out?
Bit of a disappointing response...