Hacker News Reader

Comment by Impossible | Hacker News Reader

There is a lot of implied ill-will on HN, I'm guessing the phrase "embrace extend extinguish" in Microsoft related threads gets upvoted? From the post I see that many Microsoft employees (at least in research) use Blender. Microsoft decided to pay for the software their employees are using, which happens to be open source, so the best way to do that is to donate to their foundation. Epic Games, Google, Nvidia, Valve, AMD, Intel, Ubisoft and others have done this (looking at the list of corporate sponsors is easy). This isn't a plot to take over Blender and destroy it from within...

View on HN

Exactly. According to the membership page[1], Microsoft will be paying between €30k/year and €120k/year[2] to the blender foundation, along Intel and Ubisoft. On the other hand, Nvidia, AMD and Epic games[1] are contributing €120k+/year each.[2]

All of these companies get "direct access to the Blender team for strategical discussions. Roadmaps and priorities will be aligned with your requirements as good as possible."[2]

I don't see how they're going to "extinguish" blender. With this kind of reasoning, OpenBSD was also "extinguished" in 2019.[3]

_____________________________________

[1] https://fund.blender.org/#credits

[2] https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/

[3] https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2019.html

The extinguish phase is supposed to come after the embrace phase. Even if Microsoft wanted to extinguish OpenBSD, it's no wonder they are still fine if MS just donated last year. That is not "this kind of reasoning" at all, that is just a strawman.

>"direct access to the Blender team for strategical discussions. Roadmaps and priorities will be aligned with your requirements as good as possible."

Call me a language snob but this writing is so poor.

"Strategical"

"As good as possible"

Can I submit pull requests to that page?

I don't think so, this seems to be managed by a wagtail based django project: https://git.blender.org/gitweb/gitweb.cgi/blender-dev-fund.g...

So this text copy is most likely in their CMS database.

If I'd have to venture, it was written by a non-native English speaker.

Yup, Blender are based in Amsterdam.

The whole point of this kind of thing is to be able to influence the software that your business relies on.

It's certainly possible that Microsoft (or any other company with the $$$) can influence the strategic direction of Blender in ways the harm competitors and/or other Blender users. I'm not sure why that's such a controversial concern to have, that kind of thing happens all the time. There are likely mechanisms in place to protect against it, but what are they and are they good enough? I don't think "just trust me" is a good approach to take.

Whenever I complain about any piece of OSS, I get told to submit a pull request or fork it on my own. If people are that concerned about MS having influence over Blender, why don’t they just fork it and maintain their own branch? That’s the point of OSS right?

Theoretically sure you can "just fork it". In practice, for complex software, it carries enormous cost. In that case "just fork it" means "organize dozens of engineers willing to volunteer their time (or pay them)". For software complex enough, forking just isn't a feasible option.

And now we see why big companies are willing to pay the Blender team to continue development.

That was never a mystery to begin with.

I’m having a very difficult time reconciling your initial post that sounded like you were unhappy that Microsoft was paying Blender developers with your statement that it can’t be forked because it requires too much money to develop followed by your conclusion that there’s no mystery to why big companies pay open source contributors.

Either Blender is so big that it can’t be maintained without the financial support of big businesses, or the financial support of big businesses are a negative influence on OSS projects. Which one is it?

> Either Blender is so big that it can’t be maintained without the financial support of big businesses, or the financial support of big businesses are a negative influence on OSS projects. Which one is it?

It can be both. That’s what my original point was. I’m not criticizing Microsoft or disagreeing with this arrangement. Other commenters are assuming this false dichotomy as well, which I think is invalid. A company can certainly support an OSS project financially, while influencing it in ways that harm competitors and users.

I have no opinion on Microsoft’s motivation, but users and competitors would be wise to consider what mechanisms are in place to protect their interests as well.

In theory, yes. In practice, many people hate certain privacy-related aspects of Chrome, so someone created an ungoogled version. You'd think it would become an instant hit, right? Wrong: most people on HN commented they would never install a browser built by a random person. It's paradoxical but this is how things are. You'd need to have a very particular position in order to be successful as a fork (e.g. MariaDB, LibreOffice). Most forks just die out as not even their creator uses them.

Not to mention that Chromium is massive and complex and unwanted parts of the code have been found and removed long after they were added https://archive.is/4VijY.

The mechanism is that the software is developed and released under GPLv2+ terms and that Microsoft doesn't completely control ownership over the software. Ergo, there's no "extinguish" step. They can't make their changes a proprietary fork nobody else can use, they can't force you to use changes you don't want to get access to changes you do, and any other person making changes to Blender can use theirs.

Yeah, Blender make it super clear in the link you provided ( https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/ ). Pay 30K euros per year, and a Blender dev will work on the features you want for 6 months per year. This is way cheaper than Microsoft forking Blender, and paying their own fulltime devs ~$200K USD/year to work on the fork. Plus the Blender devs know the software really well, and are going to be far more productive, don’t need a Microsoft dev manager, etc. No conspiracy theory needed, this is just a cost effective way to get the features you need added to Blender.

Damn that's really cheap. I wonder what happens if deliverables are for whatever reason not delivered? What visibility and cadence does a corporate sponsor have with their assigned dev?

I assume it's not full-time for 6 months. More like this feature is concretely assigned to a dev.

Also it's a donation not a contract.

They probably can't extinguish Blender any more than Oracle could extinguish MySQL (Larry must have been really mad for that), but I remember what happened when they acquired and ported Softimage to NT. It worked for a couple releases, then it was abandoned, after killing killing SGI by validating NT as a 3D animation OS. The Softimage acquisition, as a business, made little sense to Microsoft - it was a low volume high margin business, completely opposite to what MS does.

SGI made plenty of suicidal moves by itself, but I remember the Softimage thing was a big blow.

I always thought Microsoft did this in order to make inroads into the high-end graphics market, which they did.

That was why they bought Softimage (the then leading 3D animation tool) back in the 90's. Today Microsoft has ample presence in high end graphics.

Microsoft acquiring Softimage made perfect sense at the time, Microsoft was wanting to push NT into the CG/VFX market, but because of the risk around companies producing for a platform that noone uses, someone had to throw the capital at it, and so Microsoft did.

Softimage|3D survived for a while after Microsoft sold it off, its eventual obsolescence seemed to came about from the drive to more extensible platforms, hence the new platform Softimage|XSI put out to compete with Maya.

Its also somewhat perfect irony that the company known for its Windows NT based 3D animation software (3DS MAX), Autodesk, would eventually end up owning the products which brought the big players over to that platform.

SGI also helped contribute to IRIX's obsolescence by producing NT based systems for this new Softimage|3D on NT move.

> Microsoft was wanting to push NT into the CG/VFX market

That's what I meant. In isolation, the business meant no sense. It was a PR move to validate NT as a graphics platform. With that goal accomplished, I got the impression the product languished without significant development.

> SGI also helped contribute to IRIX's obsolescence by producing NT based systems for this new Softimage|3D on NT move.

Indeed. Microsoft assisted SGI in its suicide.

MSFT isnt trying to do that, just read the blender article, the link provided says what MSFT uses it for. And I think Blender stands a chance to gain some good AI assisted toolset if that is what they use blender for.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/0...

I used blender since the beginning. It makes me so happy to see it evolve over the years, first to open source then to a widely supported project.

Donating my meager highschool pocket money to help buy the source code ended up being the most impactful thing I've done in life so far.

My story is similar. I was near broke, but I was having so much fun with Blender at the time that I made the donation. I had been an Animation Master user on Amiga in the years before Ton bought the source code. Good times and great to see Blender flourish.

One day I noticed some wag in a youtube comment section opine that "embrace extend extinguish" should really be called "Control, Alt, Delete".

The "embrace extend extinguish" only makes sense when the company doing it has

1) The ability to extinguish 2) Or the business model of the embraced company is seen as a threat.

It's funny when Microsoft launches WSL and "loves Linux" how quick people are to use EEE. But MS has not the capability to kill Linux (1) (that sail shipped long ago) and it's not aligned with it's current business model (2)

About Blender... How is supposed Blender to challenge or threat MS?

Normally if management approves this kind of spending, they have to be convinced. You need to properly justify your proposal: what kind of competitive advantage this would give us and so on. Companies don't spend money just to "have some influence". They want to have this influence for their advantage. And unfortunately Microsoft has a very long history of misusing this advantage.

The only times I see embrace extend extinguish get brought up on HN is when there is legitimate concern. Obviously, on something like this if someone is bringing it up it would appear inauthentic. However, I frequently see inauthentic articles spewing Google hate that get upvoted and anything that gets brought up suggesting it is manufactured is automatically downvoted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com