Microsoft is now an official supporter of Blender Development as they have joined the Development Fund as a Corporate Gold member (EUR 30k/year - half year developer time).
Ton clarifies:
Microsoft did not mention any requirement how to spend the contribution. It goes to the grand total, of which we can hire more contributors. See the jobs page!
Of course, this has already led to some jokes like this:
Blender, but with XP theme... https://t.co/JOrlsQjiKO pic.twitter.com/XLWYbzRFKp
— Mike Pan (@themikepan) July 30, 2020
10 Comments
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Amazing news (I think).
Sad but true story, i decided to move from Softimage to Blender just because of what happened with Autodesk but, as Bart says, this is another kind of deal so, hopefully this could be a good news. More money = more Blender development! :)
Microsoft finally admitted they were wrong about open source:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/18/21262103/microsoft-open-source-linux-history-wrong-statement
I think this move on their behalf, to support Blender, is headed in the same direction. No frills there. It's like thinking Blender would be acquired by Epic when they gave the $1.2M mega-grant.
I think everyone knows, nowadays, what Blender's philosophy is about, and also what its legal terms are.
I'm embarrassed to see all the negative sentiment here after a company has committed EUR 30k/year to Blender development with no strings attached. This kind of childish negativity does NOT reflect well on us as a community and may make other companies stop and think before they support us.
As such, I'm deleting all the microsoft bashing and will only allow on-topic comments going forward.
30 k a year with no strings attached? Sounds like a good deal to me. I've been blown away by the 2.8x releases. More money means more development and that can only be a good thing. Ton's no fool. I'm sure the money will be put to good use.
For 30k euros did Microsoft demand that we only say good things about the company?
Publicity is worth quite a lot. But I think primarily it's because they use Blender in their own projects, so it's in their interest to support its development. They've been contributing to open source projects a lot recently, including Linux Kernel.
On the contrary, Blendernation is IMO not the platform for [insert company] bashing.
I could be wrong. :)
This is excellent news.
Blender has had traction for a while now and showing it is a driving force in the 3D scene.
What interests me is that Windows 10 has that slightly annoying "3D Objects" folder right under This PC in File Explorer, like 3D files were going to be an important feature in Windows 10. But as far as I know, all I've seen is some "fun" ability to add 3D objects on top of movie clips (or something like that). So what are/were Microsoft's intentions for 3D? It's like they had this big idea for Windows 10 but never took it forward... until now perhaps?