Blender Development

Development Fund Report, July 2019

Bart ·

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.

Link

Author Bart
I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Community Lead at n8n.
Advertisement