Adobe Joins Blender Development Fund
blender.org
blender.org
What’s in this for them?
…because I flat out don’t believe for an instant they’re doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.
But Adobe recently acquired Allegorithmic and their 3D texture tool Substance.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/23/adobe-acquires-allegorithm...
This already happened, some sites wouldn't work in Firefox unless Firefox had the Chrome user agent string.
Also who is going to sue them? Firefox? That's like kicking yourself in the balls.
An exec at John Deere donated 500,000 to a 501c3 (non lobbying) for right to repair, which John deer the company matched. Doesn't mean the company is going to be supporting it anytime soon.
If we want to get into hypotheticals, it's within adobies line of products to get into 3D. Maybe they want to look into copy+pasting blender for their product line.
This is much like Mark Zuckerberg's donation to Diaspora [1], the decentralized and open source social network. It's a token donation to the opposition that isn't really viewed as a substantial threat. It can be pointed to internally and externally as a fig leaf, but it doesn't yield any strategic edge. It's cheap posturing, and it works.
They sell 3d assets and that portion of the company probably doesn't care what you use them in. Besides if they get you buying assets from them it is another channel to sell on.
Yes in MESH modelling. Blender could eat 3Ds Max. But not in NURBS and BIM. (I guess I am too much pedantic about '3D modelling' here.)
The absolute state of HN.
Some people who buy don't see the "annual subscription" detail and then whine later
They specifically hide the details of the yearly subscription when you signup, and it’s the default option. The renewal, regardless of purchase date, is jan 1, the least likely time for people to be paying attention, and the renewal notice only lists them monthly charge. When you cancel, regardless of the amount of time remaining (that you still pay for), your subscription is terminated at the end of that month.
Yeah yeah, whinge whinge… but does it really make you feel better about yourself to mock others who have been basically scammed out of money by not reading the fine print?
Does it really matter which company does this kind of thing?
That seems quite mean to me… and that uncaring corporate profit at the cost of everything else is “the Adobe way”.
The other posts about Adobe wanting to create a paid marketplace to “monetise” blender seems to be the reason they’re doing this.
Surprise, surprise.
Adobe are a grade A asshole company abusing their near monopoly in their niches.
I think the investment has already paid for itself.
After Effects doesn't have the physics engine necessary to make something like that, so it comes with a trial version of Maxon Cinema 4D. However that version is pretty limited and couldn't do what I needed. Presumably if I paid Maxon I could get the "full version" or whatever, but instead I went with Blender, which proved to be a very good tool.
Meanwhile, After Effects was effectively rendered (pun intended) irrelevant in that process. I assume Adobe is aware of this kind of thing and wants to keep itself as relevant as possible.
You must have had some concerns when other large companies were given board seats of other open source products because they had thrown hundreds of thousands of dollars? No?
You said 'one of those companies'. So I'm sure there are companies worse than Adobe that are already doing it. Then we will later complain that they will use this as a way of controlling the project.
> …because I flat out don’t believe for an instant they’re doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.
Don't blame you for your skepticism, but once the money rolls in, then everything is forgotten; as always.
> Better with Blender, together: Adobe partners with Blender on development fund and new plugins
> [...]
> First, I am thrilled to announce that we’re joining the Blender Development Fund to help ensure the longevity and success of this dynamic open-source community. Additionally, we are going to help creators work with the best of Adobe right in Blender by launching two new plugins — Substance 3D [2] in Blender and Mixamo Auto-Control Rig Plugin [3] for Blender (both now available, in beta).
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All in all, these plugins sound like marketplaces for Shaders and Animation Curves, respectively
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[1] https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2021/07/20/blender-develop...
> ensure the longevity and success of this dynamic open-source community
Nice. But, Can you(Adobe) please also make Photoshop and other Adobe products available on Linux as well ? It would really benefit Open Source community.
How would it benefit the open source community? They would be proprietary binaries, likely only on one architecture.
I don't see how more proprietary software is something the open source community wants.
If Adobe made their software available on Linux, that would allow many people to migrate, which would in turn help expose those people to lots of other F/OSS software, which would then build up their userbase over time.
None of this would happen instantaneously, of course, but there's a precedent for this sort of "small" change causing large shifts. For example, OS X having a unix foundation was the trigger for the gradual (but eventually large-scale) move of software developers towards macs.
I use a mix of proprietary and free software at any time.
I guess most Linux users are like me: using it mainly because (for me) it provides a superior experience all the way from installation, through painless maintenance, fantastic desktop usability (for me) and extremely much better performance.
The last one is worth emphasizing:
1. the compiles are relevant for me are consistently around 30% faster on Linux
2. starting executables (and this includes git) is so much faster that using anything else afterwards feels just dumb.
In practice, I perceive some (highly deserved) sarcasm towards Adobe.
I'm of a different persuasion: better to not have Adobe software on Linux. It'll give a bit more space for alternatives (as it's already doing), and Cthulhu knows we need that. It's not perfect, but it's a start.
Adobe needs to go away.
Keep in mind, Photoshop been around more than 30 years. They likely to have legacy codes in the software that can turn ugly in Linux. PS have a behemoth codebase, it will take them a while... a long while to port to Linux along with the plugins and everything else.
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...
I think they should partner with Gog and offer legacy Adobe tools...relive the good old days of pre-cloud Adobe.
My guess: Autodesk. Maya and Max are Autodesk's cash cows. Blender is attack said cash cows and thus weakening Autodesk who Adobe might be seeing as a competitor in other realms. Weak reasoning I know. At such a low dollar sponsorship it could just be Adobe uses Blender for their commercials or something else trivial.
I think this is Adobe hedging their bets against Autodesk as they don't have a full 3D DCC software suite. There are 3d modelling and rendering features in some products, but they are just in a supporting role.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/416285/revenue-of-autode...
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press-release/linux-foundati... https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/gametech/open-3d-engine/
So they are doing a lot more funding of open source work!
Mentioned here but probably more succinctly elsewhere https://www.latex-project.org/publications/2020-tagged-pdf-f...
I am relieved that Adobe is supporting Blender rather than making a move for their own 3D engine. Maybe that'll come down the line though.
However, even with Adobe, I'm really tempted to give them the benefit of the doubt in this case no matter what their own product plans are. With how companies/studios' 3D pipelines are, you can't lock your customers into all your tools. I'm assuming what Adobe would like is "blender users will have a Substance subscription, and have access to our assets marketplace"
I guess the good part is really getting to be a solid part of the list of "suites your tool should support".
It'll be interesting if Blender starts encroaching on Adobe's moat. Not sure what Adobe will be able to do if/when that happens.
I'm curious if this can happen with the game engine world too, but Godot is too far removed from Unity and Unreal to even be comparable. It's a shame CRYENGINE isn't open source, though it's a bit dated at this point. Maybe Lumberyard?
Not to mention their software all still basically ships as yearly versions, we now just have to pay for every years updates when before you could say buy one year, skip two, buy the next.
I've been a Blender user for 15 years, I jumped on somewhere before the 2.4 redesign.
There have been some really awesome advances in Blender over the past two years. Things that really changed my typical workflow in an absolutely good way, Eevee and all of the node work for a couple amazing new additions.
They've also changed a lot of things, namely keybindings, UI, certain modifiers, that had been done in a certain way, and that I'd committed to muscle memory, for over a decade. Those changes also had the effect of breaking years worth of accumulated tutorials and bookmarks as the workflows they mentioned are not longer relevant.
It's intensely aggravating to spend 10 minutes figuring out how to do something that you used to know how to do with the flick of a wrist. Especially when you fall back to searching how to perform the action and only find 4 year old stackoverflow posts which state the old way to do it.
I've even recently taken a weekend reimplementing the old full color icons, which required a full custom compilation, due to the lack of contrast in the new uneditable monochrome replacements.
I fully admit this may just be my initial steps into the grumbly guy who doesn't like change in my software. But I can't help but compare Blender to Firefox.
Awesome tech and a great mission, sometimes aggravating UI and workflow changes, important relationships with would be rivals.
As someone who is also still on Firefox, my opinion is that loads of cash didn't necessarily turn out great for them either.
For me at least I consider my custom hacked up, modified keybindings as best they can be, Blender to be nearly feature complete for the work I do. It's awesome that it being opensource has allowed me to nudge it in the direction that works for me. Like I said though, as a long time user I am a bit concerned.
The next x users are many more than the current y users.
Annoying the y for no reason would be stupid. But not making improvements for the x because the y were there first is a recipe for declining relevance.
It is a topic which does have ongoing discussion within the Blender community going back a few years [1].
[1] https://devtalk.blender.org/t/huge-issue-community-split-bet...
Also, the UI is insanely well scriptable.
I'd absolutely love to see the renderer brought into something like a VS Code webview and maybe even adopting a real Lisp for the code.
I think development could be massively sped up with a little funding. I tried libfive (https://libfive.com/studio/) too which is roughly similar to OpenSCAD but faster to sketch with imo. There was a good discussion here on this topic too if you were interested: https://forum.openhardware.science/t/open-source-cad-and-ope...
This is "Commoditize your Complement".
Adobe is doing this to weaken one of its greatest competitors, Autodesk.
Additionally, Adobe's software works well with Blender as part of a comprehensive design suite. They'll likely increase the number of subscribers in the short term by doing this.
The danger to Adobe would be if Gimp and Inkscape got anywhere near as high quality as Blender.
As pointed out by a few comments on one of my threads [1], Amazon is doing the same thing to Unity and Epic Games' Unreal Engine with their open sourced Lumberyard engine, O3DE. Amazon is going to make money from Prime Games and Twitch. If their move succeeds, an engine is just a commodity.