I would love to see more people supporting Blender. Just 5 Bucks is enough. Doesn’t hurt.
I have no doubt about BF management, but as a Foundation, and especially being related to FOSS, they should make their finances more transparent. I would donate if I had access to an anual report where I can see what is being spent, and where.
This would defnetly help to increase the trust.
I’m not sure really i think its that much of a big deal. Lets face it at the moment 260 guys out of a squillion users are funding a couple of full time developers jobs, that can be nothing but a good thing.
The bronze subscription costs about the same a Big Mac meal here in the UK. Even if you use blender as a hobby there is not many other things you can do which is so reasonable and lets face it fun.
its not like they are after your bank account details …
i’m not sure i understand the reluctance to donate. And i also don’t understand why its so low key on the blender.org site?
I didn’t notice that I got auto-unsubscribed when I didn’t have the funds available on my account to pay the subscription one month. I subscribed again a few days ago and I’ll update it more often so that I always have the required sum on the account this time to make sure I don’t get unsubscribed again 
Kickstarter projects gave us some nice examples on how teams can get funds from outside. Even simple perks make a difference, helped with visibility.
The focus here seems to be on the subscriptions, but what about the blender shop, or the foundation’s training ? Harnessing the potential of direct content seems to be a more viable of a funding option to me. And other people have mentioned it on this thread : simple rewards for a person’s contribution can be a working motive.
Aside from that, do users truly think blender is being developed too slowly ? Coming from 3dsmax and maya, I don’t really feel that.
As soon as I get out of debt the first thing I´ll do is donate to the Blender foundation. Even though I don´t make my money through 3D, and might never, I love playing around with Blender, and appreciate the effort it has taken to get it this far, and wish for it to be taken even farther in the future 
Go Blender devteam!
In my opinion there should be a link to the blender development fund on the first page.And a perk could be for those who pay for the Diamond subscription to have a banner link on the blender.org page that is clearly visible. And that everyone that pays for the fund could hva a banner that said something like: “Proud to be a sponsor of blender.” On their own homepages. Just to make the fund more visible.
Btw: If you can not join the fund because you either don’t have paypal or don’t have a credit card you can e-mail Ton and do yearly payments through international wire/bank transfer. Supported from Gold to Diamond.
It might not be a big deal to you but that doesn’t mean it is not to other people. I happen to firmly believe that any organization that is operating as either a charity or non-profit should publicly file financial statements, whether required by their home country or not. It is a requirement in many countries for very good reasons.
Hi Harley
Thats fair enough, if you want transparency on the Foundations finances thats not a unreasonable thing to ask. But for me i’m not convinced thats the real reason that people are reluctant to donate.
I don’t think people want assurance that the money is not going into hookers and Jack Daniels. I think people want to see which projects are being supported. And if their particular pet project rendering, BGE or whatever is not on the funding list they won’t contribute. Which for me is a little sad.
Personally for me donating can’t be anything but a good thing for Blender and i’m happy to contribute financially.
Are you talking about this, which is on the blender development fund page –
Reports
September 2011
- Grant for Jeroen Bakker, to complete his 10k funding target for the OpenCL compositor project.
- Grant for Lukas Toenne, to complete his funding target for Particle Nodes.
October 2011 - March 2012
- Grant for Lukas Toenne, for further work on particles and node systems in Blender.
- Grant for Nicholas Bishop, for applying GSoC sculpt/paint branch and other modelling related todos.
April 2012 - June 2012
- Grant for to Daniel Genrich, for improving smoke simulation and animation inside smoke domains.
- Grant for to Jeroen Bakker (atmind.nl), to finish the new tile-based compositor in Blender
July 2012 - Dec 2012
- Grant for Sergey Sharybin - for 30h support/development per week, during 6 months.
Jan 2013 - March 2013
- Grants for Sergey Sharybin and Campbell Barton - for 30h support/development per week, during this period
- Reservation for Andrzej Ambroz, Icon designer for Blender.
do you really think the geeks behind blender want to waist their money on hookers and alcohol… I THINK NOT!
what they really want is more ram and cores CORES MORE CORES OMNOMNOM
No, some lines written on a web page are no substitute for proper financial statements. Income statement, balance sheet, etc. Nobody’s worried that they spend their money on hookers and blow, but I would never give money to a charity or non-profit that is not transparent with how its money is used.
I am not sure the lack of funding can be tied to anyone reason, but the over all sum of those reasons. As such, I do believe transparency is important…not because those contributing feel that the funding will be wasted on hookers and booz, but because there is a sense of inclusion when seeing the financial details. The ultimate sense of feeling a part of something greater, and there are numbers and weight behind it. The human brain loves that which gives an emotional response, this leads to immersion and invested interest in the outcome. The lack there of results in disinterest for the most part.
You will find many marketing techniques and even political support is based around sentiment and the ability to illicit that emotional response. This shouldnt be interpreted as blender having to operate like a political force, but key in on the cause and effects of presenting the fund and finances to their user base (and those that contribute) as though they are part of something greater, like a board member of a company or such. The idea is to take away that “you are just a user” feeling, and turn it into “you are blender, you are part owner, its success is your success”.
That said, the other big reason is like you said regarding which pet project is being developed. It goes right back up to the emotional response. If I make game assets and require a strong game asset workflow, it would make sense for me to support and be interested in that as opposed to say the compositor getting more attention. On the Autodesk Maya side of things, a lot of old time users are threatening to leave because each new version focuses mostly on animation improvements, which isnt important to a decent chunk of the user base. As such they are usually “forced” for financial reasons to keep upgrading the software even if it doesnt have improvements in the fields they work in. This same feeling can be applied to how Blender is improving. A lot of Game Engine folk dont see any improvements on that front, nor even the desire to add to it and as a result feel alienated. Why donate if its just going to make the video editor better or add more unwanted features? Its one of those double edged swords, in which the more features you add and more fields of cg you cover, the more you have to develop all of those fields across the board to make sure those users feel the improvements in their own workflow.
A lot of what defines blender in the industry and even certain users, is the feeling of uncertainty. If we can eliminate that or minimize it with transparency and perhaps a more fine tuned form of community interaction, its possible to increase the feeling of inclusion and thus funding.
This is a weird hypothetical but bear with me…
Say a company made a closed-source application or game from the Blender Game Engine, and that company sold that game, and that game became as popular and financially successful as Call of Duty, Halo, WOW, Starcraft, Counter-Strike, etc. Say the company, then invested in an R&D department to improve Blender and/or the Game Engine and give back so to speak (ofc modifying the code and redistributing, they would be legally required to open-source it).
I guess this would be similar to Red Hat, IBM, Novell and other companies that contribute to the Linux Kernel, naturally because their products are based on it. Similar to that situation, would the above scenario help Blender Development?
This is completely my thought and I’ve already expressed it in other posts. However BGE is still far to be able to produce game like Halo, however it’d be largely sufficient for Android/IOS game. So if the Android port was finished, I’m sure successful developers would give some money back to say “thanks” to the Blender Community iftheir game is making money. Small & simple games are the one that make the more profit (doodle jump, angrybird, fruit ninja, etc…) so BGE could provide all the tool to make a very successful game on android or IOS.
Now, there is no free/open-source game engine being able to produce Android games. Even Torque has no Android port for the moment. So I’m sure BGE could attract a lot of dev and become a source of profit if it could produce android games.
That’s already not legally possible, all the code for the game needs to be/stay open-source, not just the (potentially unmodified) BGE code. You can however restrict the usage of the game assets in order to stop a game from being redistributed freely (this is how it works for the id tech engines).
I should’ve clarified, I meant using a loader such as BPPlayer to get around the GPL, as program output like the Blend files are not covered, correct? That being said, the only thing is the development of the game would be limited to whether the changes were incorporated into the official Blender builds, otherwise they would have to release the source code of their game as I’m assuming a modified Blender would also require the modified Blender output to follow suit.
You could say a company like this sounds like a “front”, or maybe it’s a good business or open-source/proprietary relationship model.
Actually, I have an upcoming project using the BGE, but not for a game…I’m hoping it’ll bring Blender and Linux to the mainstream, although Ubuntu seems to be spearheading that movement. It’s nice to see Apple OSX and Google Android/Chromium(Linux) entering the market. Personally, I feel Google is headed in the right direction with emphasizing the Internet aspect, but at the same time, sometimes I think they’re trying to take over every device hooked up to the Internet lol. Sorry for the tangent, back to Blender…
I should’ve clarified, I meant using a loader such as BPPlayer to get around the GPL, as program output like the Blend files are not covered, correct?
If you read the GPL FAQ carefully, you’d find that any interpreted code that uses e.g. the bge modules would be required to be licensed under a GPL-compatible license. The blend file isn’t just program output, but more like a container (like a zip file) for any kind of data.