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Comment by ognarb | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting. Does it means that Canonical will now employs one or more Blender developers?

From reading the press release. It appears as if Canonical will just handle support contracts with external companies. Basically they will have a help desk or something if those companies/their employees are having issues with Blender. Part of the proceeds from those contracts will then be passed to Blender for it's further development and to fix bugs that may arise in LTS releases of Blender. I do not believe they are hiring developers it looks more like Blender is out sourcing technical support to Canonical with a bit of a kick back.

Seems like a good partnership to me imho, granted I've never worked with Canonical's support.

fwiw, one time I went to their jobs page and it was down. I filed a ticket on their Github repo and was able to follow every single step of the resolution in public. They also were quick to fix it.

I don't know if that's indicative of the typical support contract experience with them, but would happily repeat the experience.

my only experience of canonical the company was when one of their technical consultants showed up to a meeting, opened his laptop and it was running windows. Bit disappointing really! Was a few years ago tho

To be fair, Canonical partnered with Microsoft to make Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Perhaps the consultant was running Ubuntu (on Windows).

Given my experience with similar products at Canonical, they will probably employ folks familiar with Blender, maybe even engineers who can fix bugs here and there, but those developers will not be spending their days working on upstream Blender. They will essentially be maintaining a Canonical fork of Blender, with occasional upstreaming of security fixes where it makes sense.

Since this appears to be a collaboration with Blender that would be a bit weird.

Not really, like I said this isn't the first time Canonical has done stuff like this. They both make money from it-- for the most part, that's the collaboration.

Don't read evil intentions into the word "fork", it's really the only way Canonical can promise any sort of support. They won't be developing the fork to compete with Blender, they'll just be supporting it and maintaining it. Trying to do that in a place where you have no commit authority would be impossible.

Would probably be more palatable to say they are maintaining their own branch or release. Yes, it is the same thing, but there is a bit off implied intent with the word fork.

shrug sure.

Fair. And I fully cede that insisting on other words here is silly. I had meant my post mostly as a question, but forgot the right punctuation.

"Fork" kind of implies the codebases have diverged and there is active maintenance of the fork; "Patchset" is the more common term for changes distros apply to an upstream project before they package it - and this is something most distros do when they fail to upstream the changes (usually due to some benign differences with upstream).

However, sometimes the differences can be sharp, such as when Mozilla disagreed with Debian's patchset[1] (it was around trademarks, UI assets and branding). IIRC Mozilla asked Debian to stop calling its package Firefox, so Debian - perhaps vindictively - chose "IceWeasel" instead. Good times.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_software_rebranded_by_...

A fork is a copy that is maintained separately, and that is exactly what is happening here. You're actually quite right that, if all they were maintaining was a Debian package, they could theoretically maintain a source package with a vanilla orig tarball and keep their changes to patches, but that's not what they're doing here:

> The support offering will include Blender LTS releases across Linux distributions, Microsoft Windows, and macOS.

They're not using quilt to do this. They're using git. At least, that's how I did it when I did it for Canonical.

I expect most things they'd do wouldn't actually require a fork of Blender, just developing Blender extensions in Python, and integrating existing and bespoke Python modules into Blender.

They're not developing new features, though. They're literally supporting Blender as it is. If there's a security issue in Blender, you probably won't be able to fix it by creating a new Python extension.

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