And how the BF gets developers working fulltime on Blender? With the money, they get from donations, merch, and other stuff.
BF devs’ work is not free, their product is free.
Addons devs’ work is free, their product is not free.
You want to change that? Maybe, instead of treating addons devs like underdogs, you could think of other solutions that actually arranges everyone?
right, thats true, it is not going anywhere discussing the actual society and the responsibilties for that, lets take some action…
dont tell me that blender coders are interested to get money to eat ! 
it is extreme !
no, it is only a mental decease, to think money first… especially when it come to open source app.
Divide = control = unsatisfied ego = more profit = unlimited frustration… and so on…
anyone can choose their path… happyness or frustration.
i will continue to dev for free, as i win money creating 3d contents. happy
This! If they can afford a computer with the muscle to do 3D creation work in a country where $2 can buy food for a day, and they are crying that they can’t afford a $10 add-on, something literally doesn’t add up.
we are discussing that point in our office from more than a month… how to get everyone happy… but still, dont get other solution… things are community based, or not… thats the point.
good evening… this discussion will be now in the underground for sure… lets prepare the answer to the bizness model… it has to be answered quickly, before the release of the 2.8 
How they will eat without money?
And how people who can’t make 3d content but only code will eat?
Do you listen to yourself?
You want to force people making code for free for the esprit of the open source O_o
And this is not extreme?
And you will work for free on this huge and impossible task?
Don’t forget, most of the addons don’t follow blender’s workflow 
This post confusing. You want the devs to not get compensated for their work, but you want to make money making 3D content?
It seems to me that the disconnect here is that you seem to value 3d content more than you place value on dev work when in fact it should be the opposite or at least of equal value.
Otherwise I really have no idea what you are trying to say. If money is so bad why try to make money at all with your 3d content? Why not give it away like you expect add-on developers to give their stuff away?
So you are discussing how everything should be free, in your office, for a month. Right, got it, you have sufficient finance to run an office, but want everyone else to work for free. Got it. Tells me all I need to know, not that I had any doubts.
The BF is working on a solution to kill paid addons business?
The solution is easy. BF implements all those missing/extra features (that add-ons try to address) which will solve the paid add-ons problem. Btw you realize it is not a problem for everybody, some people like to get those features asap instead of waiting for BF to implement them.
To be honest, I see a good balance in the community regarding the free and the paid add-ons. I do not understand why this bothers anyone. I released both free and paid add-ons. I have nothing to gain or loose from either way, however I tend to think that certain material benefits motivates the devs, same as getting appreciation for free addons they release.
Either way, developing add-ons takes time and the devs should be free to decide on the method of improving their motivations to develop further.
Uriel, who is paying for your office? You can afford to rent an office, but you expect everyone else to work for free, for your benefit? This is obscene!
There are addon developers who are not good enough artists to sell assets. But according to your world view, that’s the only acceptable way for them to make money. What are they supposed to do?
You are completely devaluing their contribution! The Blender Foundation could get access to all the major paid addons quite easily and bundle them with Blender. The license allows it, but they are not doing it, because it would be disrespectful and they know the developers would not continue to maintain their code.
I also fail to see why selling addons is not okay, while selling art and locking creative commons assets behind a paywall is acceptable, as it is done for the Blender Cloud. This is clearly limiting the creative freedom of many people. The very same is true for locked or paid tutorials. Not everyone has access to it, but for some reason I don’t understand, this kind of paywall is not a big deal.
I am really happy that I don’t know many people who have such a narrow view on the Blender ecosystem.
Like the “Poor Countries” trope, the refusal to recognize 2.8’s many new features and enhancements (to support a narrative of the BF deliberately holding back to make people buy stuff) is also becoming a trope in and of itself.
Look at the dev. logs, many commits each day. Look at how large the release notes for 2.8 are. Also don’t forget that the devs. could find thousands of todo items for improving Blender yet there’s only a handful of paid devs. at once to do them. The BF also will not reject patches because an addon for something similar exists in the Blender Market.
Anyone who really feels greedy (yes, people who don’t have much money can be that as well) can find the addons on github and download/use them, but do expect a backlash from the community.
CAD is typically thought as an engineering tool. If you look at the computer keyboard you are typing on today, chances are the keys are plastic. To be able to manufacture something with such exacting requirements needs a program that can keep track of very small tolerances, while still being able to create the “constructive solid geometry” that is needed to create a mold for the item all the while calculating offsets to handle things like shrink factors, sprue location, ejector pins, draft angles, and other plastic molding techniques.
These programs can also help create the molds, do stress and heat analysis, create machine paths for metal cutting and so much more. And many of them typically cost so much more as well.
Solids are so much better for working in the real world, and if you had a 3D printer, you’d understand instantly. 3D prints are “watertight and manifold.” This means they’re solid. CAD programs can only create solids, just as you can only create solids in your workshop with wood, nails, glue, etc…
With Blender, it’s easy to create non-solid models. It may be a microscopic hole or a flipped poly or a one sided surface. There are a myriad of ways to build non manifold geometry in surface modelers. Trying to fix it can be very time consuming. I used to use surface modelers for my 3D printing, then switched to Moi (a solid modeler) and all of a sudden things got so very much simpler.
The other thing is surface modelers work with polygons, not NURBS. So, the “atomic” unit of a surface modeler is a face or polygon, which has a “facet” and so it’s not possible to represent exactly a curved surface in a poly modeler. This can come into problem when you’re trying to solve for multiple continuous surfaces, such as where a car fender meets the hood of a car. A very difficult math problem indeed.
One downside to CAD and NURBS is the convert to polygons issue. It’s very difficult to create any sort of clean (and human editable) mesh when converting from NURBS. Moi probably has the best converter I’ve ever seen, and it still has problems. The resulting mesh is typically impossible to work with unless you retopo it. Check this CAD to Poly mesh I created years ago to help show the problem.
@anon2581475, like you, I don’t put too much weight in poly topology, though CAD topology is just horrendous. Correct topology is great if you need to animate a character (think stretchy bounce of an M&M). It provides much less value for Hard Surface models, and in fact, IMO, the Sub-D route is overthought and overused.
See this workflow for instance. With it I can get the topology I like, without having to Sub-D. Like many CAD systems, it does create parametric hard surface models in Blender. Something I’m currently working on:
My point is not that there is no development, that would be absurd, so put your strawman back in the closet.
It’s that there’s nobody at the BF that tackles these relatively easy, relatively quick-to-do improvements that are nonetheless significant pain points. And maybe because of addons, they seem to feel comfortable letting them languish.
I think it might be due to the BF attempting to tread a fine line, straddling a point between adding new, useful, and necessary features that make for a more complete package, while trying not to step on anyone’s toes in the addon community.
I doubt Blender would see nearly as much support if they freely aped every good idea that popped up for sale on Blender Market.
It’s one thing not to take the addons’ GPL code and distribute it with blender, and a different thing altogether to just let core functionality be shitty so someone can make a few bucks.
The baking addons (there’s like 4 of them) are a prime example of addons that shouldn’t have to exist because they’re just patching over a huge gaping hole in core functionality.
You are so wrong. Blender addon business is making Blender more attractive, because of what´s possible once you give the developer an incentive (money). Those addons wouldn´t be where they are without developers being able to dedicate more time for development and support. B-l-e-n-d-e-r wouldn´t be where it is without paid development.
And I´m not sure when Ton said you shouldn´t make money from development. The original idea of open source software was to have access to the source code for the software you bought. That remains the same. It was never about not allowing people to charge for software.
You are perverting the idea of OSS…
Question!
I make an addon, I added my own icons, icons are not GPL, they are my property, same for json files.
So, how do you deal with that?
GPL says, if you sell your product, people need to pay to have access to the sources.
You don’t need to make the code public.
How do you deal with that? You break the GPL for the open-source spirit?
At one point, if all devs put all addons public, they can sell updates, it’s GPL, it’s not the same code.
So, right now, client pay one time for an addon for life, they could pay for each update, less good for users, better for devs, more money ^^
Need to change blender addon business model.
Not any more buy once, free update for forever.
Option:
But this model need blender market or Blender Fund support it .
