> ... Apple has joined the Blender Development Fund as a Patron Member.
To find out what "Patron Member" means, it's 120k or more per year[0]. It's the highest corporate tier Blender has. Nice to see Apple supporting open-source.
To find out what "Patron Member" means, it's 120k or more per year[0]. It's the highest corporate tier Blender has. Nice to see Apple supporting open-source.
It is also exceptionally rare Apple donate this amount of money to any open source organisation. To the point I would argue this is very non-Apple. There could be some strategic interest for Blender, although I haven't figure it out what it is.
Edit: Someone mentioned AR/VR. Which could be the case here.
1) Attracting pro creators to MacBooks requires having top-tier Blender support and performance on Mac, so Apple's interest is in making it run as well as possible
2) some future AR/VR tie-in
This is very un-Apple-like, but I really, really, really, really hope they keep going in this direction. There's zero reason for Apple to keep being this stodgy. Why aren't they doing "cool nerdy things" anymore? Their built-in apps are fine but why don't they try to make an Apple-sanctioned macOS package manager, with Apple repos and third-party repo support? Don't they understand the incalculable goodwill and excitement that would generate? That by doing this, making Safari a top-tier browser with the best standards support, implementing zero-knowledge iCloud encryption, working with Docker to improve performance, improving Xcode stability, and refreshing Pro Mac hardware minimum yearly even just to keep them competitive, as opposed to letting them languish, like the Mac Pro (2019) and MacBook Pro 16" (2019), they'd more than make up for every bit of illwill they earned with the post-2015 MacBooks and come out ahead of Microsoft with their WSL2 and new Windows Terminal? Apple knows how to be cool to "average people" but they've forgotten how to be cool to nerds, when it used to be effortless for them!
None of this has to do with core strategy. I'm not asking them to open-source macOS here. It's just the basic ability to execute on obvious things that's missing.
For example, in Windows 11 Microsoft really opened up the Microsoft Store, by loosening the eligibility requirements. As a result, it has tone, tons of apps like Creative Cloud, Discord, LibreOffice, VLC, that would never come to the Mac App Store in a million years. That creates pro-user goodwill. So does this Blender news by Apple. I hope Apple realizes how much money they're leaving on the table, because often they don't seem like they give enough of a fuck.
Right now, Cycles does not have any GPU acceleration on Mac. Windows and linux its fine, but mac is very limited.
Having a group of people, even if its a small number, be vocal about avoiding their computers and have a good reason behind it, isnt worth the 120k a year that it would cost them to be a sponsor.
Apple prefers BSD/MIT/Apache because that's just easier for developers to reason about but GPLv2 code that's a standalone binary is generally not a problem. Besides, Blender is a tool you use to generate non-GPL work product. From the perspective of authoring 3d content, GPL doesn't pose any kind of problem for them, even if they also needed to use Blender as part of an automated toolchain somehow for ARVR.
Something, something linked libs something…
In all fairness though, I'd imagine a big chunk of this being Metal's fault. I'd be dragging my feet too if I found out that I had to re-write our graphics backend just to support >8% of the desktop market share.
Companies like Apple also need software. To me this donation to Blender is just a gesture to show they like to use Blender in-company.
... in a domain where they have either no products or their own products have clearly failed to obtain traction.
Not going to happen for anything where there's an even reasonably successful Apple product, I think we can be sure of that.
So yes, it is really nice to see Apple supporting Blender but let's not confuse that with open source/libre software in general.
I know they didn't start those, but they all have major contributions from Apple.
Edit: No amount of downvoting makes me wrong, they aren't open source. The AppleClang != Clang trunk
> Swift, FoundationDB, Obj-C, Darwin...
Edit: And it indeed is downvoted whatsoever...