I mean 2.79.6 one of the latest builds
Ok I will prepare the file
Iāll to adress all points, feel free to say if I forgot one:
- I already teach everything, there is no secret and all my students have the code.
- the BF accepted some of my patches, some not, the patches in E-Cycles were not submitted thus not rejected either yet.
- All addons on the market are GPL, so the risk is for everyone. But indeed the Blender community seem to be respectful of developers (Python and C/C++ one)
- Red hat, those making Ubuntu, Google with android all make money with GPL code, even in the many million.
- What I offer is not only code, itās regular builds for 2 platforms on 2 versions, very fast support, new features every month. All reported bugs in my code were fixed under 24 hour.
- Ton wants new cycles dev to be paid by other like for Lukas and Stefan. Working in an open maner was how I started. Trying to make a funding was way too low to live from it, I already said I would prefer to concentrate on code instead of marketing, building, etc.
- Did you ever try to make a review? Itās not as simple as āitās fast and people are happy and it never breaks so letās have it inā. Again, there are lot of other factors, like time for review from paid devs, some more obscure most people donāt understand.
Now a question from me: Brecht, Lukas, Sergey, Mai, Stefan Werner all sell their code. What is different with me? That you know the job is already done and they say the job will be done? I find it good they are paid, I find it good Iām paid. And again, I already tried the open bar way, the download/fund ratio was less than 1 of hundred. I think anybody able to buy a render PC can afford 9ā¬/month to get it 2x faster. And in one year, everybody can have it anyway.
The other ways are:
- continue to work for free: Ok if you get me a flat, food, computer, transport, and everything I need for free.
- stop working on Blender, so there is no speedup at all and the 3 people in this thread who think itās bad making money with Apache/GPL code are happy.
I have the impression many people speak about things they never experienced, basing their reasoning on a beautiful but theoretical world . Learn to code, try to fund your work, make reviews of your code for the BF, then come back here and speak, I think you will have another point of view on the reality.
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I had hoped that the āwhy are you charging moneyā debate was over. Oh well.
Mathieuās work is compliant with the GPL. Thatās all we need to care about. As long as thatās a given, there is no problem.
Yes, heās selling Blender builds. Blender builds that contain some code that I wrote in my spare time and contributed for free. So what? I donāt feel cheated, I was well aware of that possibility before I submitted my patches.
If anyone feels like the patches from E-Cycles should be available to everyone for free, go ahead. Buy E-Cycles once, request the source code and publish it. Nobody can stop you. If you want to, provide regular builds for all platforms. Test them, too. Once youāre done with that, youāll notice that Mathieu is not only contributing code, but that making and publishing builds is work too. Work that he absolutely has the right to get compensated for.
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hey. whats about a benchmark for small renderfarms up to 100 slaves?
What do you mean? If you have 100 slaves with cuda rendering, they all will get the speedup. As long as each slave render one frame, it will scale linearly.
We use Blender (cycles) for feature film vfx with mutiple renderfarms. Just want to be sure, that it works in command line rendering before we try it and waste time
Iām not debating that he should get compensated for his work, that is clearly his right. I also donāt disagree that he is doing a substantial amount of work which warrants charging money for. For me, personally, the guide on merging patches would be worth the money, considering the hours of time it could save me trying to figure it out on my own.
Iām suggesting that maybe putting potential gains for the entire community behind a paywall is a bit distasteful. Testing changes made to a piece of software is, well, what development is. As for making builds, almost the entire process can be automated, as can be seen with Buildbot.
What would probably look better in the eyes of the community is submitting each change that makes Cycles faster without ruining temporal and spatial consistency to Master, and selling the rest of the (very useful) learning content he is providing. Anything which he has done to modify Cycles (which still hasnāt been described clearly) which isnāt consistent with Cycles philosophy will then be evident and people can more easily determine whether they want those compromises in their version of cycles. Currently it seems like a combination of debatable āhacksā and genuinely useful improvements have been applied, adding up to the āOMG 400% speed increase!!ā hype which seems to be driving the majority of community interest.
I donāt doubt he has made some significant improvements to Cycles - which is why I would urge him to submit them to be merged. āThe guy who made Cycles 20% faster with a single patch is selling material explaining how he worksā sounds a heck of a lot nicer than āSomeone is selling Blender with bunch of changes made to itā. Iām not in his shoes so I donāt know what other considerations he has in the decision-making process, Iām sure he has good reasoning for his decisions, but thatās just my thoughts.
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You may not be aware of this, but youāre suggesting that he do more work for less pay. Submitting, documenting and polishing a patch until it is accepted to master is extra work on top of developing the actual feature, and can sometimes take up more time than writing the code itself.
Sure, volunteer work can improve your public image. But public image doesnāt pay rent.
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Iām not entirely new to developing Blender though I forgive you for thinking so, given that we are on an open forum.
I have made non trivial changes to Cycles and understand that the process of merging a change isnāt simple. I have based my opinions on the knowledge I have and while it is certainly incomplete, Iām not just throwing ideas around with no reasoning.
I understand the implications of my suggestions. That may be the case. It is of my opinion that contributing to open source software is not a viable employment option. Iām a full time developer. Iām sure Iām in the majority in saying that any contributions I might make to Blender occur under the assumption I wonāt get any financial gain out of it. Of course that limits the resources I can devote to improving Blender. I agree, public image doesnāt pay rent, but it can lead to a heck of a lot more negotiating power when it comes to finding employment which does pay rent.
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Thatās how we make our own choices. Mathieu chose to earn his money this way, and I wish him all the best.
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Ok, sorry, so then you know a part of my reality at least, yet not all of it. Great if you have enough money and time to afford working for free on a prolonged period of time. I hope I will be able to go back to that state again at some point.
And by the way, the 2.7 version has an option to make the image is 100% like official version. Itās 1.7x faster then instead of 2x in mean, but not a single customer is using it as far as I know, so it proves the other 30% are good for artists.
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Those people who decided to use Blender for their professional work maybe can afford a small monthly fee.
The devs arenāt unreasonable, and for those of us who understand what implications certain changes might have, it is understandable that they might not want to merge whatever changes you have made.
I disagree. In certain cases they are. Did you know Cycles in Blender 2.80 Beta and 2.79.6 is 20% slower in render preview? Itās a huge speeddrop and apparently they didnāt care. Look at you own eyes (https://devtalk.blender.org/t/slower-cycles-gpu-in-blender-2-8-beta/4513/5), but here is the point:
ābrecht: Weāll try to fix it for the release, itās not very high priority for me. Progressive refine never had great performance.ā
Itās not true at all, Cycles GPU beats V-Ray Next GPU even with the speeddrop. And thanks to Mat it turned out there is a lot more under the hood. Iām really looking forward to what he can do with the render preview and thatās it is worth the money for me.
vray is faaaaaaaaaaaaar better than cycles
Not for my workflow. It allways depends.
Iām not debating the value of the work he is doing, Iām sure there are many people willing to pay a monthly fee for access to what heās doing. My comments are regarding the possibility of alternate methods of working with the community.
I think there are parts to that problem that you arenāt fully aware of or are not considering. A pointless 20% drop in performance is a big deal, but I have many doubts that is the case. Remember, Blender 2.8 is not released. Shifts in performance are expected. He is clearly saying he will make an effort to fix it for release.
In the worst case, progressive refine is 20% slower because the developers deemed another feature more valuable than this. That is highly unlikely to be the case, and this is definitely not a case of developers being unreasonable with merging changes.
My point above was this: if there are clear changes which the developers can see improve performance without hindering image quality (which it seems like most of the optimisations are, given that he can get identical results with a 170% speedup) and can see why those changes help things, they will happily merge it. They wonāt reject a straight up performance boost. They likely will reject changes which, as I said before, break temporal or spatial consistency with sampling, or change the resolved image.
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Of course it is. Chaosgroup employs over 200 employees, many of them top experts in their fields with salaries appropriate to their skill. You canāt do that if you donāt get paid for the product you make. Especially not if the main source of your funding is a community that for the most parts tend to be dicks about having to pay for stuff. 
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I donāt believe working for a long period of time without income is a good idea. I certainly wouldnāt be able to do it, Iād be homeless in a matter of months. My understanding (which may differ from others) of contributing to open source software is that you so under the understanding that youāre not getting paid. Work a job, and contribute in your spare time. If you can find someone willing to pay you to work on it, then great! But it is unfortunate to lump genuinely beneficial changes to Cycles in with mostly unrelated (but still very valuable and well worth its price) learning material.
If you can find 100 people to pay a subscription to you in order to develop Blender for them, why not contribute those changes back into the community at large? The people still receive the exact same improvements regardless, plus, more people will find out and likely fund further development. I think thatās the essence of my suggestions.
I have thought long and hard about how to make a living from contributing to open source software. I have a few theories such as Patreon-style subscription based āemploymentā where people subscribe to keep you developing, and an alternative feature-based crowdfunding style, where you put your price to develop a certain feature, then if you get enough backers, you do the work and get paid. Both of these allow the development to benefit everyone, which was the key prerequisite to my theories.
I havenāt considered what youāre doing as an option because I honestly donāt feel like it is healthy for the community. Noted, these are only theories, and I havenāt seen anyone try to work in this way, but I feel like there is a better arrangement than what you are doing now.
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I recommend you read some of Tonās own comments related to making money from open source.
Note that many companies like Red Hat, Microsoft all work on Open Source and make money of itā¦ A lot.
Iām happy that Bliblubli is managing to perform these levels of optimizaiton, and as you stated he should be compensated for this.
To me this is no different then Blender Developer Fund., except that in this case you can put your money into specific function.
There was another developer who also did a lot of OpenCL optimization in the past, and I was glad to pay to get that extra performance. After a while he submitted his work back to Blender.
Now, there is also a possibility for Blender Institute to hire him, but that would mean Blender Institute would need a larger Blender Development Fund to be able to actually pay him.
Now I personally would rather supprot Blender Dev Fund mainly to ensure Blender Stability is top notch. Extra performance I can wait, but fixing crashes and such I canāt
Still in the end, it is up to each and every one of us to decide what we do with our money, you can go and support a specific developer like BliBluBli or Blender Dev Fund or Hire your own developer. No one is forcing anyone to support BliBluBli.
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