EDIT: After dev. feedback and facing my own tendency to extrapolate one-liners into major issues, I have determined that I wound up bungling (with the initial post) what could be a legitimate discussion, starting over…
The intention of this thread is to figure if there’s any changes that can be made (whether to Blender development, the community, or other areas) that would encourage long-time developers to stay on-board as active contributors.
The reason for that being is that over the year’s, Blender’s development scene has seen a number of developers phase out their activity. Now it is true that we can’t make them work on Blender indefinitely, but the departures of long time devs. can make a potentially big impact on a project due to their level of experience and knowledge of the code, it can also affect a project in other ways such as causing an otherwise actively developed of the application to essentially become largely orphaned (ie. commit activity for said areas ceases altogether until someone with interest picks it up).
So the question is, what can we do to encourage long-time developers to remain active contributors (or at least long enough where another developer is ready to take up their projects)? In a similar vein, how can we slow down (if possible) the process of getting worn out from working on the same codebase for long periods?
If you are seriously looking for a productive discussion, you should not start with rumors for which you still haven’t shown any evidence! I seriously hope that no one picks that up and starts a boulevard press kind of discussion here.
I don’t see how those two points have any influence on developers leaving Blender development. The developers agreed on slowing down the development and consciously decided against making 2.8 in an incremental manner. And regarding your first point, I am not sure which targets you mean, but in software development, it is not unusual that targets are not met. Compared to others, Blender is far more open to communicate goals.
If you want to keep the paid developers, a good starting point is to give them job security, which can’t be provided by the Blender Institute and the Blender Foundation at the moment. As the developers don’t seem to be paid very well according to the numbers that are visible e.g. on the Blender Fund page, there should be at least a certain security for them. However, that’s not the case, because there are not enough people who are willing to pay money for that. It is for sure that with their qualification, they could easily get a better paid job with far more job security. So, they clearly must have a lot of passion for what they are doing.
It wouldn’t hurt if they were welcome here in the community, but let’s stay realistic.
I would also continue like it is, evoluting progressively but with one change : allowed to break compatibility. Where rewrites are needed, they will be done, where not, they won’t.
Regarding Lukas, it’s hard to tell what went wrong, but he certainly isn’t pure innocent in the story. I mean, he get funded for nodifying Blender since 2011 https://www.blender.org/foundation/development-fund/ . So there may be problems on both part like often.
However I can understand devs want to earn more money or want something more organized. I’m just not sure it’s that much better in many companies
It’s good if Blender is a good learning platform for young devs or a playground for more experienced. You can meat nice people and build a nice reputation here and leave when you feel it’s the right moment, nothing bad with it. Ideal is when it’s somehow planned and a solid successor is trained to continue the task and the started jobs are brought to a good state before switching.
So yes,
small, manageable steps that
make improvements quickly available and
let the devs free to leave relatively quickly when they take another job (with a 3-4 month release time, it’s perfect to complete the feature, debug it, polish it’s UI and leave).
good reviews from experienced devs to help new devs come and although benefit from the learning process. When they in their turn have a good portfolio of “master” features/enhancement, they can find a good job, that’s fine. Don’t bind them to long, both devs and users can benefit from an evolving team.
Maybe we shouldn’t turn what was an off-handed and possibly tongue-in-cheek remark in IRC into a forum thread.
On the other hand, the remark may be referring to the fact that the BI simply can’t offer the kind of well-paid full-time career job with a christmas bonus, health insurance, social security and unlimited supply of fresh fruit that the modern software developer has grown accustomed to.
At some point, developers will just “grow up” and realize that all the development freedom in the world isn’t worth giving up things like a retirement plan and being able to, say, take on a real estate loan. Even if they don’t admit that it’s about (the equivalent of) money, it becomes more important as they get older and realize they’re missing out on a lot of their remaining earning potential.
This suggests that there may be some deep problems in the way the Blender project is being handled, a way that is scaring away potential developers and discouraging others from sticking around.
It all comes down to funding. The best project management in the world can’t have a skyscraper built at the price of a bike shed. There’s a reason why literally every advanced professional 3D package has a four-figure price tag attached: You can’t do it for less and stay in business.
The question is, which developers are actually being scared away? Certainly, it’s those that expect to be hired at market rates. Instead, Blender relies on enthusiasts and entry-level people to do the work below market rates. Again, those people won’t necessarily stay around for too long, but they still keep on coming, as far as I can tell.
In my view, if we embrace the fact that this has served Blender reasonably well in the past, given the limited means, the conclusion should be to just accept people leaving and lower our expectations towards more ambitious goals.
Seriously, I think that you guys the last weeks write a lot about this kind of things about bad development.
The problem maybe could be real, but it’s really easy to solve, make the people put money in the project. The license is a problem? ok, search a way to solve that. Search sponsors that have a lot of opportunities with this. For example google, unity,…
I do agree that job security might be a factor, but I don’t know if that really tells the whole story.
If a developer does get a more secure job with another company, then he is always free to remain in the Blender scene as a volunteer (either giving advise/insight, coding in their spare time, or both like what Brecht is doing). Campbell is also being reported as still being available on IRC and even continues to code a little.
However, the reports so far from IRC and general activity suggests that other than the planned appearance at the Blender conference, Lukas Tonne has otherwise stopped all involvement (even to the point of no longer answering questions from other budding physics developers like Luca Rood). What is concerning is the possibility of Blender’s development culture leading some to not want to have anything to do with Blender anymore, and this being while Ton has mentioned in the past of wishing he had more developers on board.
If this is so, then it’s not going to be something that is solvable simply by throwing money at it.
What is the problem with that? The Devs are not robot with no life, that have a debt with the universe and must code something for blender the rest of their lives.
The issue is not that the devs. should be expected to contribute to Blender for life, but rather the departure from the Blender scene being rather abrupt in nature and without warning (to the point where people asking questions about the code suddenly begin to get silence instead of answers).
Can’t be at peace, while stars are falling from the sky.
Or are those really stars?
Know, those were meteors & meteorites.
Spreading fear, hyping the spectacle doesn’t help accepting the beauty that was observed. Moments pass.
These lines are same as low level politics, rumors, assumptions and speculations.
What to do?
Accept, help, observe, comment, test, research, practice, work, promote, create, imagine, show… just stop with this animalistic nonsense.
Think, contemplate, study, think twice… before acting once.
If you look at my commit statistics, I am not as active anymore as I’ve been e.g. two years ago (not taking this years GSoC period into account). Where is the “Is DingTo tired of Blender development, is Cycles a not contribute worthy project anymore?” thread?
Seriously, what’s the point of all these speculations anyway? Developers come and go, and if they decide to take on another task in their life, that’s totally fine. If there is a general issue with the project that makes developers leave, we should check, but I honestly don’t see that. Yes, two great people decided to do other things now. At the same time talented developers joined the project this year. That’s live. It’s Open Source. I might be wrong, but afaik Lukas wasn’t employed by the Blender Institute after Cosmos Laundromat anymore, so it’s totally up to him if he keeps contributing in his free time or not.
I seriously don’t understand why some of you think that if a developer stops working on blender there is a problem and the community should give a solution.
IMO it’s all pretty normal cause BF/BI threated blender as its own product, same as a business company does with their products.
And that’s the point: a business company knows how to finance their projects, and how to deal with developers, in the sense of attract, keep and eventually substitute them. Will BF/BI be able to deal with that issues? Their problem, not yours.
On a side note, seriously… Blender’s development attractiveness on new developers is more or less the same that a nude 70yo man/woman has on a teenager. You can find a some “pervert” here and there, well de gustibus, but you can’t expect that much.
Also in most of the cases you won’t get paid and the decisional thing is pure property of BF/BI so your ideas and your work will be vain most of the times.
As for the developers’ life’s choices… well it’s none of your business.
I’ve made too much blah blah blah.
What I want to say? Blender project is not a community project. It’s the project of a pseudo-company that in some cases can make miracles and in some others cases can fail badly.
If there is a problem, it’s not a community problem.
So relax and let BF/BI make their choices… as it always has been.
First of all, what do the two points in the first points have to do with developers leaving?? Missing goals might be annoying for the users, but for devs? As for the second point, at least for me the 2.8x project is a huge positive factor - finally we get to toss out old stuff and replace it with something better instead of having every second project end due to some weird design decision 5 years ago.
As for all the speculations here, I’m completely at a loss where they come from - I never noticed “deep problems in how Blender is handled” or anything like that.
Seriously, people on BlenderArtists treat the Blender devs like some celebrity family - every two days, someone else starts speculating about the next secret exclusive drama happening in private. Why??? You can read IRC, you can read developer.blender.org, you can read the mailing lists - there’s no secret place where everybody is fighting 100% of the time but hides it from the users. These rumors and “scandal stories” are getting tiring.
People come, people leave, that’s how it has always been in the Open Source world. Just look at the past, at the people who contributed to Blender back in 2002 when it was open-sourced - I’m pretty sure that Ton is the only one who’s still involved with the project (and even he stopped coding actively, although that’s probably due to lack of time). Seriously, this is perfectly normal.
From my own experience, there are times where you just don’t feel like coding on your project right now. Luckily, I’m just a volunteer, so I can just do something else for a few days (that’s the main reason for all these lighting patches after GSoC ended instead of continuing with the Denoiser straight away). However, I can imagine how this starts to get repetitive and boring after a few years.
Please, can we just stop having these discussions over and over again? All this speculation, rumors and negativity is hurting Blender more than any missed features or leaving developers could.
Right, I actually totally agree with everything you’re saying. The solution is for the Blender Institute to make more money so they can pay their developers more.
@Ace: I really don’t think it has anything to do with how the development is being run at all. In fact, I would say the opposite. I think they are doing a great job all round. Missing targets are just the way things go. I personally don’t feel any ill will toward the devs for missing some targets. So they guessed wrong about how long it would take? This happens all the time in development. The difference is that most other payed software development is done in a vacuum to prevent their secrets from getting out. No one even knows what they will do during their dev cycle. I’m much more aggravated when a year of silence is finally broken only to find that they have been working on things that don’t have any relevance to me or they have barely done anything.
I also think a lot of people are taking notice of how Blender is progressing more than anything. I work in CG character animation and I have noticed more and people talking about Blender. More and more forums of other software have threads about Blender and how it’s progressing. Not to mention, the foundry have adopted a very ‘Blender’ like development cycle for Modo. Did you know that they are doing several smaller releases of Modo per year? Just like Blender.
If you want to have a helpful discussion about anything, I think we should talk about ways to increase the BI’s income.
They left without leaving a large and public “I love Blender, Good Luck for the future” letter, and that is the basis for your speculations?
Ever thought of applying for a job in the yellow press business? Might be worth a try.
I’ll leave it at that then, this was a heat of the moment thing and I really want to be a part of helping to improve Blender development and dev/user relations rather than hinder it.
Since the both of you know so much more about Blender’s development scene then any of us, and since both of you are of the belief this would hurt the project more than help if it continued, then I apologize for even bringing it up.
IT’s really hard read this thing about blender new features when every software don’t have this number of new features each few months. And if BI explode we will have a software that with plugins could be usefull ten years…
