Even as an architect, if you buy a 1070 + E-Cycles 2.7x instead of 1080TI, it’s as fast if not faster and cheaper. And if you already have a PC, the time it saves and the number of fast iterations it allows are a real plus. An architect/visualizer cost easily over 40€/hour, so when you save 4 hours, it’s amortized. And those saved 4 hours are quickly reached with E-Cycles.
yes, got your PM, I have a lot of them at the moment, sorry if I oversee one. Only 2.8x has a monthly membership.
Imo I don’t feel you need to explain yourself why your product is worth the money. If I was a professional the 9€ a month or 100€ is literally nothing for a freelancer or company.
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Hello everyone, I have a question: are those speedups also in the viewport render o just for F12?
To be clear, you are providing the source code to anyone who purchases your fork, correct? That’s a requirement of the GPL. Providing patches upstream a year later is fine, but if you’re distributing this (and you are), then the people you receive binaries are also supposed to get the source code as well.
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Isn’t the cycles code itself under an apache license?
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Yes, but he is distributing blender, not just standalone cycles.
You’re correct about that. I’d forgotten that bit. So technically, only the source code changes to Blender, outside of Cycles, are required to be distributed. The Cycles changes don’t have to be shared.
EDIT: This is assuming that the binaries are distributed separately. If this is being distributed as a single binary, then the GPL takes precedence. Of course, I’m not a lawyer blah blah blah… but it’s best to make sure everything is clear in this regard.
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See my answer which clearly show that I do. On top of that, all my students have the code.
Now you ask in a way that really make feel bad and which on top is wrong. Red Hat for example keeps your money for your subscription if you ask for the code, but deletes you from it’s clients and forbid you the access to future updates, which is “bad” but legal. I could have done the same, but instead teach people how to do code it.
I submitted my last patch for review (now in 2.8 which cuts render time by 2 for architecture visualization), although the donation level I fixed was not reached and even did the review, recoded some other parts which weren’t from me with duplication and did the bug fixings when needed. All that for 400€, ask one of the BF devs to do that… And the result is having the moderators come to me like the police to check everything is according to some false laws. @SterlingRoth, you could also have read my answer to Pixelfox and see I do a course about it before bringing another reason why I’m obliged to do something I already do, giving the impression I do illegal thing.
Ton broke my last crowdfunding by using words like “code hostaging” although the source was already available to anyone, to then take my code without a thank you. He then advised me to go work for Insydium (Cycles4D). Those guys took my work without paying a cent, never submitted any significant improvements I know of to Cycles, yet never got criticized by the Blender police. I think I understand why their coders got sick.
Ton managed to take one year of Funding by AMD and used 4 Month to really make the OpenCL kernel rewrite, the rest to try to make it available to CUDA and CPU. 8 Month lost for nothing, as it is slower and never used by anyone.
Now I bring a 2x speedup, make it really affordable, teach how it works and get questioned.
But I learn, for my next set of patches, I’ll find better ways, like Insidyum to be appreciated by Ton and you?
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@bliblubli , I was just responding to synaglow comment on the apache license. but since you are soliciting feedback:
You’ve gotta understand the optics of the situation. It looks bad for you to be holding onto an optimization in an attempt to capitalize off of it.
I understand that optimization takes skill and effort, and it clearly can make a large difference. However, it can be hard to justify how much you deserve to be paid based off of that.
You’re trying to angle a year’s worth of pay out of a few lines of code built on top of hundred of thousands of lines of code which are freely provided. Not a good look.
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Cycles is available under the Apache license, but the version integrated into Blender is licensed under the GPL just like the rest of Blender, so I don’t believe this can provide an exception/excuse in this case (I am not a lawyer though). Just to remind people of a couple relevant bits of the Blender Foundation and GPL licenses:
BF:
“You are hereby granted permission to copy and distribute the Software
without written agreement from BF. This entire License Agreement, and
the GPL-license.txt must appear in and/or accompany all copies of the
Software. The source code distribution, which can be found at the same
location where you obtained the Software, has to accompany all copies
of the Software as well.”
GPL:
“For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether
gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that
you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the
source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their
rights.”
So while the GPL does not care if you charge money for the software, it does require that you make the full source code available along with any binary distribution, and that you are giving up all proprietary rights to any changes that you make as soon as you distribute those changes to someone under the GPL. Every person who acquires a copy of the program has the right to redistribute it without restriction as long as they comply with the requirements of the GPL.
The GPL promotes a software development environment which operates like a “co-op”, where everyone contributes a little because they want to share in the results. This is just like a group of farmers getting together to buy one combine harvester for $1M and then sharing it during the harvesting season. It works great because none of those farmers are in the combine harvester sales or manufacturing business. Of course the sales people at John Deere hate this idea because they believe that every farmer ought to be buying their own $1M piece of equipment from them.
In the software world this co-op development method works great for something like Blender where many of the people who want to use it also have the ability to contribute to it, perhaps writing an add-on etc., or maybe they just contribute money to support paid developers, and everyone gets the value of everyone else’s work. This is because like the farmers, the majority of people working with Blender are 3D artists, not professional software developers, and they don’t ordinarily make their living writing software like blender, just as none of the farmers are in the combine harvester business. Thus the key is that the people contributing to the project are doing so with activities that are not their normal profession.
Where it does not work so well is where a company tries to get the benefits of open source while simultaneously trying to make money selling something that’s actually free. A good example is RedHat, who “sell” RedHat Enterprise Linux even though it’s covered by the GPL. This leads to some weird corporate neuroses where they try their best to make you think you must pay them to get access to the product, and many customers are used to paying for things like this so it works. But just try to find a page on the RedHat site that tells you Linux is actually free software and that you could get the same distribution from CentOS for free. CentOS is even owned by RedHat now.
In the Blender world, there are many people selling add-ons for Blender which are covered by the GPL due to the way they’re integrated into Blender using the Blender APIs. For the most part this works fine, because people don’t mind rewarding the authors for their work, even though the GPL actually encourages people to share software and you might think that only one copy of each GPL add-on would ever be sold because the person who bought it would just share it with everyone on the internet.
At some point though if you’re trying to pretend that you have your own proprietary special product that’s really just an enhanced Blender, and that the community norms and software license don’t apply to you, and you try to charge a lot of money for your special version, you may find that some people will be unhappy about this because they perceive that you’re not playing by the community rules. And the GPL will make it very difficult to make money in a traditional fashion if people don’t voluntarily choose to go along with it.
Lots of people have contributed vast amounts of time (many without any direct compensation) to produce the platform that you’re building on, and they contributed their efforts because they wanted to see Blender get better, and in most cases because their main motivation was so that they themselves could have access to that better Blender. This is one of the most magical things about Blender as a project, that the “co-op” model applies so well to it.
I think everyone is really excited about the improved Cycles performance and the potential of getting these benefits in the official Blender distributions.
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And who are you to judge what is worth or not? If it’s easy work, why isn’t the official version already 4x faster? If I understand you right the 25 000€ the foundation gets is worth because they write lots of lines, whatever the benefit of those lines is?
And if you want to bother people making money by only improving a bit years of work made by other, bother everyone on earth. Even Steve Jobs wouldn’t have invented the Iphone 3000 years ago, nor 100 years ago, because he used/build upon years of research, trials and errors, improvements in health care, education. Every single program you use has open source code. The Blender market and this website surely use a lot of opensource code, your android smart phone, you make money with Blender, the Blender Foundation makes money with OpenSubDiv, with OSL, with Python. Show me how many percent of Blender is written by Ton or any other paid dev and how much is written by the rest (people like me, you, free addon devs, the python foundation, etc.). Ask Ton remove everything not made by devs paid by the foundation from Blender and try to fund it further to see how much users judge what is left worth 25 000€/month.
Or maybe you are the ONE that can say what is bad and what is good?
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So I tell you I give you a link to the code and you post a wall of text to show me I have to give you the code? What’s the point?
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I suggest you look into better marketing yourself.
Did Steve Jobs ever get on a forum when people were bashing apple products to tell everyone about how hard he worked and how important his efforts are and how he deserves to be paid?
No. Because he wasn’t that insecure. Again, that’s not a good look, and it certainly doesn’t inspire me to pay you.
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Personally I don’t like this as well. Blender is free, Blender Cycles should be too in my opinion. I also think it does not look good to take the hard work of many people who share it and then ignore their idea of sharing things and hold your improvements hostage for a pay. It just doesn’t go with the values of this whole phenomena the way I see it. Do you have the right to do it? Sure. No laws are broken probably. Do I have to like it? No. Can I express my view freely here whatever it is? Yes. And I just did.
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I agree I should learn to ignore.
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Cycles is still free? You can get it for free or did I miss something? People coding addon use the API, thus “the hard work of many people who share it and then ignore their idea of sharing”. But ok, I’ll let you discuss about good and bad and ignore. So the core idea is Python coders are entitled to make money, C coders only if Ton permits.
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I don’t care if it’s good or bad or in the middle. I just don’t like it.
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I’m just replying to the discussion giving my opinion on the situation, and trying to explain why I think you may be encountering some resistance to the way you have chosen to proceed here.
Sorry I’m wordy.
I sent you my Gumroad email as requested.
So you have no Iphone (uses FreeBSD, is closed and makes money) and no android device (uses linux, is partly closed and makes money). Your car is free of Open Source code? The car makers make money and keep it closed. Or is it just me?
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