“Hello World” I believe a portion of all those tutorial series through Blender Cookie does have a percentage go to the developement fund, doesn’t it?
I think the marketing of the fund is terrible. Not only do people hardly know it exists, they don’t know what it’s for. I mean, hell, I have been using blender for over 10 years and have never had a really clear idea of what the fund was for, and what benefits might accrue to me if I donate. I always assumed all or nearly all of the development was done by volunteers.
Wikipedia does a good job of this. They don’t over-do it, but they are very clear to their users about how much they need, why they need it, and when they need it. They don’t hammer you all the time with advertising, but when they do, you see it. And they get the money.
Why not put a little ‘donate’ link in the splash screen? Why not have big “donate” buttons on blender.org and BA? These are tiny changes that could improve funding a great deal.
A larger project to analyze the user base, who funds Blender and why, could lead to some more effective strategies. If there are 230 users at 10 euro per month, that’s USD $36804. Assume generously that monthly donors are only about half of the total income and we have roughly $70K per year. That’s about enough for the salary for about one decent developer per year. We can do better, and Blender deserves better!
Honestly, kickstarter projects selling fancy USB cords for Apple products routinely raise more money. With even a little marketing effort Blender could double or treble its yearly funding, I am sure.
My day job(s) heavily involve online marketing, and my opinion is that there are a lot of cheap/free options that BF could try, which would certainly improve their revenues.
There are a few paid developers, money for that comes from sales from the Blender.org e-shop, trainings in the Blender institute and donations.
The fund was first used to aid crowdfunding projects but has switched to pay further core developers recently.
There is a little donate-link on the splash screen already and on the Blender.org-site there are ads for products from the e-shop (which are more attractive than pure donations as you also get a product). When you download Blender you also see a donations-button.
Regarding paid developers: The GSoC-students and mentors are also paid and there have been some fundraisers for further paid development recently. During Open Movie projects they also hire more paid coders.
Maybe a once-a-year donation campaign like Wikipedia with a lot of ads,youtube video, article, etc… all at the same time to make the buzz could be efficient, I don’t know… But Wikipedia and Blender are not the same thing, and they have different audience.
Also, if the BGE port to Android was finished enough to start publishing games, and people making money out of it on the PlayStore, I’m sure many of the developers would give some money back to the Blender Community. If BGE can save you 2000$ by being an alternative to Unity (at least for “simple” game which are 99% of mobile games), if think the developers is wiling to share some of the revenues.
@gottfried: now that you mention it, I do recall those links. But I think general ignorance/confusion about what the donations are for is a big problem. I also think it would not be out of line to have slightly more pushy calls for donations.
I am not sure if BF needs or will be able to efficiently use the money, but users like to hear that they have some ability to speed up development.
Also, the e-shop is not necessarily a superior way to bring in money. If faster blender development is the goal, that is also a valid product. One need not want a particular book, DVD or T-shirt to want to help development. A user only needs to want the satisfaction and knowledge of helping out, that in itself is worth money. And $36 is honestly way too much for a T-shirt, whether or not it helps the BF.
While we’re still on the topic of funding, the total monthly income for the Blender development fund is now nearly 2700 Euros contributed by 249 members, an sharp increase from 208 members and around 2100 Euros a week or so ago. (definitely enough for allow for more grants to individual developers that are not part of the core team).
In addition, the page now mentions the number of gold sponsors and gives a special mention to platinum sponsors.
EDIT: The number of members have surpassed 250 and the monthly income is now slightly beyond 2700 Euros (2720 to be precise), it also looks like a new tier was created for 50 Euros (around 65 USD) a month.
Gold Sponsors are also credited now if they choose to be.
The number is still going up, but not as much as it had been.
The BF’s monthly income has gone up another 35 Euros, if Ton and co. can work to get it above 3000 per month (a 50 percent increase from the time of Ton’s initial post), imagine the additional projects, features, bug-fixing, overhauls, code maintenance, and optimization that could result from that in 2013.
Now imagine what might happen if Ton got some volunteers to update and add polish to the Blender website to allow a better showcase of that Blender can do (along with increasing the activity at code.blender.org and placing a link to it on the front page), he might get some more signups that way as well.
Lets not forget lifes tough, maybe many members on here are well off but im not. Make realtime and cloud part of the focus of Blender and were all on a winner, there are so many people wanting that market than just another renderer. Blender has the best (IMHO) model tools on the market if you spend the time to learn it, but even that has cost, Hours spent (time is money probably is the most significant phrase on the web). I do web sites as my business, Blender wants one just give me a message, but again time costs money, and my real pasion and focus is now 3D.
Maybe its a Dutch thing that there isnt a big fat donate button
putting blender in the cloud? or what do you mean?
It would be a good idea to have a link to the donation page permanently here at blender artists. Lets be honest how many of us go to the blender.org site anyway? Once you get started withe blender you will more than likely come here other than to download a new version of blender, even then i think a lot of guys use the builds at graphical.org.
It must be the most low key funding drive I’ve ever seen. Why didn’t the org announce it here where the vast majority of users visit?
Its kind of like advertising netflix only in North Korea and wondering why only 250 on the planet subscibe?
I made another paypal account and just subscribed the silver funding… is there someway to check if it has gone well?
Has the Blender Foundation ever gotten around to publishing their financial statements? As a “Stichting” in the Netherlands it is not required to publicly file financial statements, but Ton mentioned long ago that doing so was on his “to do” list for the 2003/2004 fiscal year.
http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.blender.devel/10021
My point exactly, 2003/2004. Im for giving funds if the funds are used to step forward, not a new try to Build a Physicaly correct render engine (all over the place, even have my own real time raytracer for a game engine project at this point could be called a physical render ((but it’s just not)). No such thing as a physicaly correct render engine unless you have the power to trace rays to infinaty, Blender is now at the nexus, move to whats wanted and needed like dev on a real time based engine (patn traced,raytraced,rsaterisation based trace with global rays, cone traced, voxel cone traced, makes no difference real time is where this whole industry is heading, plan ahead or just die). I was gutted when talked to Brecht who said real time dev is not anywhere near a desire, id sell all i have for blender to go in that direction.
3DLulver: None of the funds from the Blender development fund has been used for render engine development yet. It’s been used for many of the other tasks that need to be done.
3DLuver:
Archaic Z-buffer with phong gradients painter with textre maps based model is fully hardware accelerated almost 10 years, any low cost 3D card can do it in realtime, some in 500+FPS range. If you need go forward, you need something more accurate and less faked? As @GottfriedHofmann note, Cycles was almost complete when first published, most Brecht work was around other Blender code parts.
I made another paypal account and just subscribed the silver funding… is there someway to check if it has gone well?
You should get an email from Ton, sooner or later. It’s Sunday, though, so maybe not today.
The number of members is now sitting at 259, but did Ton tweak the code so it rounds the donation statistic now, the number looks like it disappeared yesterday and now it’s precisely at 2700, is it too much to ask to just show the exact number or did the amount shrink a little?
It’s at 2750 now