Discussion about Blender, and the commercialization of the Blender ecosystem

General Forums Blender Development Discussion
132

@chippwalters Wasn’t expecting such a comprehensive answer, but I’m thoroughly schooled now. :ok_hand:

I pay attention to topology when I retopo for animation, but when I’m designing, I only pay attention to what I have to. I totally agree about the trad Sub-D workflow. I think it still has its uses but for a lot of things there is a faster way.

That addon you posted looks very interesting. I don’t use Blender for creation at the moment; just retopo, animation and rendering myself (fortunate because I think the latter two are its strongest suits), but with more tools like that, maybe I’ll get there.

But to move back on topic; this whole conversation seems ironic to me. Why is it considered greedy and selfish to ask for someone to match your sacrifice of time with a sacrifice of money but it is not considered greedy and selfish to not only ask for something for nothing in return but to bar and frustrate the efforts of two other parties to make an exchange?

Plus I don’t think this has any merit. My car is not any slower because someone owns a Lamborghini. I think you have a mindset where it is better if everyone is using the same free version of Blender even if that version has fewer features and is usable by fewer people. I don’t know if you understand, but there are several addons that make Blender viable for me. If they didn’t exist, because the people making them got shooed off by people of your opinion, I wouldn’t be making do with vanilla Blender: I wouldn’t be using it at all.

Blender is on the cusp of something great. For the first time you can’t miss serious people making serious work in Blender. I don’t mean to be rude to Blender users of the past; I’m sure there was lots of good work done but all of a sudden I’m seeing a burst of Blender work on Twitter and other places. It’s what gave me the impetus to look into it; and this is totally honest; the video I saw on Twitter that sparked my curiosity was a demonstration of an addon.

Personally, I think the goal should be to make Blender the best software it can be: the fastest and most featureful. I think if you discourage addon development, that is much less likely to happen. Fewer people using Blender, and fewer people subscribing to the developer fund.

Open source projects can die. Like an ecosystem that is missing an important animal, discouraging third-party development is bad for the whole. I used to pay a subscription fee of thousands of pounds per year and the support was pretty garbage. We’ve all dealt with that faceless megacorp with customer service employees that don’t give a chit. This is not that. It is honestly so good to just be able to talk to the people making your app. I’ve never had that before and it’s great.

I just hope that addon devs don’t get discouraged because I’d like to continue to use Blender and see it improve. Believe me, if the Blender Foundation was somehow omnipotent and could make the perfect tool for every workflow you could ever imagine, there would be no need; no demand. But there is demand, and thank goodness someone rather than no one is supplying it.

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133

Why did we buy Rocket USB sticks a few months ago?

There are some “holes” in the core Blender, and it needs a huge work to fill them.

We need some people to fill some -more or less deep- holes. And this needs a payback no matter how.
Some just ask love letters, some ask coffee tips and some ask you to buy them addon in some way, and some received a salary in order to fill those holes.

Everyone is free to work how they want, share their work the way they want and everyone is free to choose which addon they want and how to obtain it, support it and use it.

If you’re unhappy with something, you can make it yourself, or find someone else to make it, or give means to others to do it… That’s part of the open software spirit too.
That’s why we bought Rocket USB sticks!

In the ideal world, the core Blender is robust enough to not need any heavy addon in the first place. But we’re not in that world.

To get to that point, you still need some people to spend countless hours and heat up their brain to make that happen, those persons need to eat too.
And when it’s done, you also need dev power to maintain the new features in the long run, it is not just granted forever.

Right now, the core BF dev team already work hard for Blender (I don’t remember where I’ve read that “they have enough work for a hundred devs already”).
How could they make Blender self-sufficient as soon as possible? Maybe with more devs?
That’s why we bought Rocket USB sticks, right?
I bet many of us would be happy to punctually give some more money for the BF.I bet many addons devs would be happy to share their revenues with the BF. But right now all they can do is either work for free or get pissed on for free.

Look at Blender’s Development Fund page. Who’s there among random people and enterprises? Add-ons makers.
Look every addon’s dev activity, they give feedback and suggestions for the core Blender, some even code for it, some make countless hours of tutorials, docs, forum help, support, …

It’s a huge interaction. In many ways. Between many people. With many abilities. Many different skills. Different minds. Cultures. And the list goes on forever. And that’s beautiful.

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134

I would propose some kind of Blender+. A subscription service that is kind of a Netflix of Blender addons. It could be modest like $5 per month and a portion, maybe 30% could go to the Blender Foundation, part could go to a guy who runs the backend for the delivery and payment system and the rest delivered proportionally to the addon makers who have their apps downloaded by Blender+ users.

Blender+ would fund the development of vanilla Blender but also ensure that users who want more and are willing to pay for more get what they need. For those who don’t want a subscription service, they can just buy the same old perpetual license from Gumroad or whatever.

Blender+ could have a sweet install and auto-update system in the program and maybe its own support system so users can ask for help from devs; maybe even a comprehensive video tutorial system with a style guide so that users can pick up a new addon and school themselves quickly without riffling through loads of old doc pages with broken links.

I might have missed something, but I can’t see how something like that isn’t a win-win.

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135

Art made with Blender can be copyrighted and sold. Addons requiring GPL Blender to run is required to be GPL. I’m certainly no expert on this though so I might likely be wrong, I’ve only had a brief discussion about this with our own software developers at work.

But once obtained, GPL says anything can be done with it as long as it remains GPL. Shared for free included. Again, might be wrong.

136

Let me just play devils advocate…

That doesn’t really have a good ring to it from the start. Sounds like Blender+ and Blender lite. Imagine opening blender.org and reading “Introducing: Blender+ for only 5$/month” right beneath “Free to use for any purpose, forever.” I’m not sure it’s a good marketing move.

If 30% go to the BF and an additional percentage to an employee, that leaves about 3,50$ per month per user that is distributed among all commercial addons by popularity. If I download 20 commercial addons, I’ve paid the average developer a whopping… 18 cents a month per user. With that kind of money, the addon market will surely thrive…
It would seem as though addon developers can only lose in that equation unless you add restrictions that would inevitably make it just as expensive, perhaps more expensive and possibly less convenient for the end user in comparison to the current addon market.

The installation of Blender is about as straight-forward as possible. You download, you unzip and you start. An elaborate installation process would only make this process unnecessarily complicated. Also, from what I’ve heard most developers understandably don’t seem to be in favour of auto-updating software. If blender auto-updates, it would be through an installer, which I personally don’t like and seem like more of a hassle than a simple .zip archive. Aside from that small aspect, the official blender version only tends to update once every couple of months anyways and auto updating experimental builds seems like a bad idea.

That would mean that developers will have to prioritize the bug reports, requests and questions of blender+ users. Again… I’m not sure what that does to the community.

That sounds like what the blender cloud subscription is partly for (video tutorials). That means that in time either the blender cloud will stop providing video tutorials, instead making them available for blender+ users or the two will overlap, which seems confusing.

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137

Very thorough, I have scanned and will come up with some responses when I have a moment.

138

IANAL, but the icons are yours. If you’ve written a separate license for them and included it with your addon, you can go after someone in court if that someone redistributes your icons. If that someone wants to legally redistribute your addon, he needs to replace the icons.
If you haven’t written a separate license for them, but have written somewhere that the addon is distributed under the GPL, then you have no leg to stand on in court, since icons can be reasonably assumed to be part of the addon. If you haven’t included a license file at all, then you are violating Blender’s GPL license.

If you had a trademark on the name of your addon, they’d need to change the name too.

Json on the other hand is still (Javascript) code, just like a c++ file that just contains definitions. The GPL makes no language distinctions, so that’s covered.

It’s true you don’t need to make your source available to everyone. Just to your customers. However, according to the GPL, your customers are free to put that code on github or wherever.

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139

Good to know, thx :wink:

Indeed, we all said that.

Another question, imagine a guy do that, put on github, so, most of addon’s devs would stop updating them since they will not make any sells anymore. (not everyone is known like retopoflow devs).
If the dev make an update, it’s not the same code anymore, the devs have the right to make people pay for this update?

I would prefer people continue to support addons devs to stay how we are now, one payment, live support (even if it’s bad for devs honestly) than losing our way of living by people who don’t care about the work of other.

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140

Absolutely. They are after all not paying for ownership, but for the act of distributing the addon to them.

141

So, let’s hope people will not make any fuzz because it’s the dead of the add-on eco-system or this possibility that will not be great for everyone.

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143

I think that was the major selling point (pun intended) with Blender Market - creator can name a price of which some/most going back to BF, but they are now located at the same space. You pay for the luxury of finding things easily. And updates would be available here too from the real creators.

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145

Out of curiosity – to put this to an up or down vote: Should we (I) download all add ons and make them easily available at a price of $0 ?

  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

146

This is not exactly correct I think, although obviously I’m not a lawyer either.

So first, you retain the copyright to everything: source code, icons, json files. You’re only giving users a license to use it under certain conditions. If you’re distributing GPL software, then anything distributed bundled with that must also be GPL compatible, which includes the icons. It does not mean you give up copyright, but users should be able to redistribute the add-on with icons included or use the icons in other GPL software.

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147

also, i suppose that if all the dev who want to improve blender can do it by adding their code for free… everyone will be happy to access all available features…
(to answer one previous comment, i dont know anyone who do scripting blender paid addons who can just get a salary out of it, one must have a proper job in media creation or similar, do you know one ?)

i suppose that if it is difficult to get proper blender dev to work on the app, it is because most of them ask for money to do so… so the point is here…
More paid addons = Less community progress = Less Blender development…
this is what i can observe right now… if every dev could participate to the community, it would be more people working on making blender better, than just running after 50$… and make more than 80% of the users without accessing experiments and new features or updated ones.

Well, lets see how we gonna deal with this in the near futur… i am curious

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148

Should we destroy Blender’s professional addon development environment? Yes or No?

Give me a break. What a bunch of entitled people.

149

Yup, came back to correct myself after checking. You were faster :slight_smile:

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150

On which planet do you live?
More great addons = more users = more funding = better blender.
I don’t count how many people said they come to blender because of great addons, paid addons.

Addon’s dev on the market give a part of the sells, also are on the dev fund.

This is ridiculous!

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151

The point is not whether such a developer exist, you are just excluding that possibility. It is not such an obscure scenario. It happens in plenty of comparable online stores.
If a developer creates a successful addon which is sold frequently enough to do that as part time or later even as a full time job, it would not be okay? At least that’s my understanding of your statements. Going part time allows those coders to further improve the addons and increase the value for the users. On top of that, many of the addon developers contribute a part of their sales to the Blender development fund.

Edit: You can also be sure that those coders are more heavily reporting bugs than artists. They clearly add lots of value to the Blender ecosystem.

153

The one thing I hate about those kinds of polls is, there is going to be one person making ridiculous claim about Blender users based on it which is going to be repeated over and over.

154

i may live on a planet where we try to be fair… :wink:
and no, i dont agree with your point of view, but thats ok, you want to get money from your script, and i just tell you that you wont… no problem.
People come to blender because it is free of charge for the license… that the truth, whatever it is for a freelance or for a company…
When we have an update for blender, (you said the guys get paid), yes, they earn money, but the product is delivered to anyone ! and that the beautifull of it.
When an addon dev release a script, it is for a few group of people… thats not fair.
If those addon dev have this knowledge, it is also thanks to the community (see the questions on the forum…), so i dont understand why they are so egoist, and why they are not collaboring with the common objectives, making blender better for everyone ! not only for those who paid, which is horrible in term of phylosophy…
Blender is not only a software, it is a phylosophy, started 20 years ago… this is why we are here… not to make profit on the beginners :wink:

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