Comments on Current Situation and Request for Ton

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

First, after a little research, i feel that this NetVentures Company need to know how WE the users of Blender feel on this matter. Be kind!

Website: http://www.netventures.nl/
Email of CEO, Ruud Veltenaar: [email protected]

Furthermore, I would like to ask Ton’s opinion on others releasing the (now famous) Ice-Man hack he called ‘Blender Creator 2.25’? Considering now there is no company to “hurt” and no obvious future?

Fellow Blenderheads, I will contact this company myself, and am willing to try and represent to community to them as best I can, if you would like. I feel that the community (minus ex-NaNers) needs to express our concerns directly to those with the power to do something (rather than to Ton as we have been led to belive).

If there is no response from this company, I am also willing to host a Boycott site, listing their products, and the sites, as well as alternatives.

Not only have they screwed many hard working individuals, Ton, Jeori, Bart, Zycho, Erwin, Frank and the rest, whom I personally, have grown to respect and admire, But they have screwed their users as well. This is intolerable from any company.

Imagine if Microsoft just up and dropped Word, or Symantec aborted production of their Norton product line? Would any of us stand for that (shut up Linux Zealots :)? This is the same. And simply intolerable.

Regards,

K-Rich

ftp://ftp.krich.homeip.net/Blender%20FTP%20Mirror/
Blender FTP Mirror (and Unofficial add-ons, scripts, etc)

2

Got my support, I was about to suggest the same myself but one step further, ie, a Blender users consortium, possibly with a view to buying the IP rights. However, I would say tread carefully until more details are available.

3

They “sponsored” NaN for a long time, giving the people you admire jobs, giving you the oppurtunity of a free 3D suite, did it although NaN failed the first time around and got nothing in return. They only lost money.

Now you go and tell them how THEY screwed NaN and the users. Users who didn’t pay a thing for support or software development (bar the publisher users). Tell them how you hate people sponsoring idealists and then stopping after only GIVING money for 1 year. Or 2. And getting NOTHIN in return, but the rights to a 3D suite and it’s cheapskate community.

Oh yeah, they screwed everyone!

I pity them for their mistake and even more for emails from unimformed people who can’t think for 5 minutes before starting with flames.

4

Green’s opinion about a boycott is interesting:

i want to know the name of that pig,so if he got some kind of bussisness we can all send him to hell and don’t buy anything from him or his company…then bankrupcy for him!! :x[/quote]

NetVentures…
I doubt you were buying anything from the companies they invested in anyways… So just continue with whatever you were doing.[/quote]

5

XYPE : since you seem so ‘all-knowing’…unless someone plans to keep the blueprints laying around for a future release and sale, how much does it cost to release the code ?

6

I never claimed I am all-knowing, but I might have a better insight into what was happening at NaN since I follow them since the GBUC.

It depends on how much the investor currently “holding” the code invested in NaN - I guess they’d at least want to have 50-75% of their money back in. Now if they only sponsored NaN after the last bankrupcy that might be around 1 million us $, if they were involved before as well that can be more than 3 million. Unless you do a gimme-pretty-pretty-please dance with 500.000 $ in your hand and they have a heart I don’t think it’s anything less than 1 million. But with that you might get access to all the NaN codebase which was much more than only Blender from what I saw, but it’s questionable if you can merge the code with Blender - since NaN had problems with that themselves. Which isn’t hard if one is rewriting the code all the time without a proper plan of what one wants to end up with.

7

they’d at least want to have 50-75% of their money back in. Now if they only sponsored NaN after the last bankrupcy that might be around 1 million us $, if they were involved before as well that can be more than 3 million. Unless you do a gimme-pretty-pretty-please dance with 500.000 $ in your hand and they have a heart I don’t think it’s anything less than 1 million

You think? It sounds really low to me, but I don’t know… Perhaps we should buy stock, LOL

Why is it when I go to the NetVentures website, I feel like I’m looking at a mafia? It felt really creepy (not a joke, really feels “wrong”) Also, their “portfolio” has Blender as their first entry. Hummmmmm…

I totally agree that they are victims of the bankruptcy, but why do they seem so sleezy?

Ah it’s probably too late, my imagination is running wild again… best to go to bed, LOL.

Good nite, Love Ingie

8

well, it seems to me, that netventures is just taunting us by seemingly keeping nan and blender at a stand still, doing pretty much nothing to make a decision and batting down suggestions like open source for no apparent reason(at least not apparent to me cause i dont know how to follow all of this corporate mumbo jumbo)… i do thank netventures for keeping nan going in the first place, but right now, they dont seem to care about it and are coming to any kind of decision on what to do next…i dont like that… there website did feel wrong also, and it reminded me an an old fashioned mafia video, no kiddin! and it seems its in some language that they made up and i cant read it (hehehe)…

well, i have no idea of their intentions NOT to release the code and help blender have some kind of progressive future… it seems that if they were planning on dropping nan all together, they wouldnt still have them listed on their sight first in the profile, and they wouldve released the code as well…

*notice all the "seem"s… its hard enough to follow this corporate crap as it is, lol, now im trying to share my unsure view =)

-chris

9

whoa, i just realized theres an english version…go me!

10

netVentures is just like almost any other company, out for money. It is a shame they feel the best way to do this is by ‘freezing’ Blender for now and not giving any of the plans which were supposed another chance.

Ah well,… I’m sure Ton’s will think of something to surprise us with.

personally I don’t see how e-mailing Ruud Veltenaar could help, but who knows perhaps he’ll show some heart :slight_smile:

Greetings,
Timothy

11

Hello to everybody.

In my opinion, this whole case with NetVentures riminds me a bit, of my last job. I was working for a small company, who had financial problems. One day, a large group of investors, came and paid some part of the companys debts in exchange for a share in the company. After that they did nothing to help (as they had promised), they just stayed watching the company to shrink. 2 months later they managed to take over the company :frowning: , and my boss got fired!!!

I don’t necessarily mean that NetVenture had this intention, but such a possibility, does have a strong point :wink: . It is possible that they were investing money in Blender, hoping NaN to fail and then take over everything…

Anyway (just in case Ton is reading this Thread), I’ve recently heard that, my ex-boss, is starting a new company from the begining, oferring the same services :smiley: . Wouldn’t it be a nice proposal???

I am really sorry for all these, I sure hope that there is some kind of solution.

Bye for now.

12

skontar : your right, like I was saying in another post, it was almost a suicide mission from the beggining. Pursing other feature (mobile 3D, etc…) before having the important stuff finished while in the mean time doing little to no marketing. You would think that if they took ‘x’ amount of money, and said ‘ok, lets get blender up to par, then market it to build a reputation outside of the normal community, then offer the extra features’ that would be a little more smarter than what seemed to have happened here.

13

one of the things my dad does is management consultancy, and one of his roles has been to evaluate potential purchases for venture capitalists. their priorities are intriging. the lot he dealt with would want to buy companies which they could make look better easily and then sell on at a greatly inflated price, so dealing in businesses as commodities. i’m not going to suggest that this did or didn’t happen here, with the VC looking to buy in so they can be deliberately bought out later, i just thought that might give some insight to the mindset.