EU have a dream? Blender in 2012!

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Publied on Blendernation:

What do you think about that?

"For the last few years, the Blender Foundation has been partly financed by subsidies from the European Union. The subsidy rounds are called ‘Framework Programmes’, and the deadline for project proposals for the seventh Framework Programme is nearing. Ton Roosendaal sent in the following article in search of ideas and assistance for this next round. Hi,
The European Union has 54 billion euros (thats over 70 billion dollars) for research/development projects available. Verse for example has received such a grant in 2003. Now, do we want this money again, and how?
I do have some insight now in this subsidy bizz, and I’m extremely reluctant in accepting a role for another EU project. An exception could be if we can define such a project to be 100% Blender related, or 100% “free and open source 3D creation tool” based. Lead by the Blender Foundation, for example.
The conditions to get accepted are varied, but the ‘consortium’ model might work best:

  • Form a consortium, consisting of at minimum 3 legal entities in 2 EU countries

  • Other consortium partners can be outside of EU too (limited list of countries, but Australia, USA and Argentina are allowed)

  • Make a research/development plan for 3-4 years. Financial compensations are based on a load of variables, but to summarize;

  • Universities can get 100% of costs funded

  • Companies 50% (but some direct costs 100%) Now I’m well aware of the dangers of accepting money and committing to long term plans. Dangers are for example:

  • Accepting responsibility for work you don’t believe in anymore

  • Accepting work on topics you find out is useless

  • Losing involvement/commitment from user communities

  • Accept enormous administration overheads

  • Yes, money corrupts in general! On the other hand, I know the dangers and we only now (deadline May 8) have the opportunity, a next EU subsidy round might be in 4-5 years. What could work is:

  • Define a flexible and feasible project for where Blender should be in 2012

  • Find the natural partners for this; i.e. universities, institutes, companies or studios that already contribute to Blender development

  • Find a way for how these contributors don’t (have to) make up Blender itself, but participate within the blender.org community projects as equal members. This can also enable or support a series of (or permantently established) “Orange” projects. Content driven projects to make animation movies (or games).
    OK, enough dreaming! I think we need first two things;

  • Who is interested to work on such plans (not only interested to get money!).

  • Can we write a 2012 Blender design without blocking innovation or alienating our user/development community? -Ton-"

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any reaction?

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Well, I think my thing is that I am in absolutely no position to think I can have an opinion on something like that. It’s in much better hands than mine.

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okay! what is your opinions?

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Well, 5 years is a long time to plan ahead, especially when it is a community driven project. It can be done, when thinking about the great developers/users we have in this community, but like Ton wrote, there are “Dangers” we maybe should not commit to. Even Linus Torvalds doesn’t plan a year ahead when working on the kernel (http://zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Three_months_is_long_term_for_me_Torvalds/0,130061733,339273115,00.htm)
Also, technology moves fast. Who would have thought of the impact of sculpting would have on modeling 5 years ago? If the BF have committed to, lets say, volumetric modeling, what if that’s a mistake? Planning for “Blender 3.0” must be watertight under these economic arrangements (I can imagine).

On the other hand, this could sustain the tremendous advancements Blender goes through with every release. Yes, money corrupts, but it is a necessity if we’re up against the commercial world (if we want Blender to be used in highend production pipelines). With the help of universities, Blender can teach students how to make it better, not just in programming, but also fields like HCI/Usability. New “Orange” projects (maybe a new short and a simple game) will help refine the tools further. A R&D grant could help Blender be unimaginable great in 5 years time, if everything is handled correctly. I also like the idea of the EU using money on FLOSS :slight_smile:

The deadline is pretty close, and it’s a though decision…

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this is a great opportunity, better we take, if not we will always be dreaming, but i think that its a lot hard work and we need people interested at helping, and guidances on how this help can be done, at least in my opinion.

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it is one of the best occasion and a really good proposal for blender to become te number one!

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That is both good and bad. Let me tell you why:

Blender has the potential to become a real industry tool. If it becomes one, and remains free, then the people behind Softimage, 3dsmax, Lightwave, etc, will suffer. Jobs will be lost because of it. They won’t be wiped out, but much like how the rampant immigration in 19th century America caused problems, there will be more than a little stress caused by a free ‘Maya killer’.

Also similar to the immigration woes, is the high influx of interested people. Suddenly, you find yourself with 10 million modelers and animators who learned with Blender, 20% of them proficient enough to work professionally, and you start (or continue depending on who you ask) to see the wages of 3d modelers and animators go down, and the difficulty of getting such a job go up.

What is more interesting though - is what George Lucas said about the film industry a few months ago. I forget his exact words, but essentially what he said was that large studios are a thing of the past, and that the future lay in small low budget flicks made by very small efficient studios and amature film makers. Blender can help make that happen, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

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I have to disagree that it would cause large-scale suffering in the industry. Yes, it would put certain people to looking for other work. But it’s much like the 2D graphics industry shakeout that occurred when the Mac hit the industry. It really democratized the process. The very skilled are still employed. What’s it’s done is to open up the low end of the industry, perhaps giving it a correction really.

I don’t think that the protection of professional wages is a very good reason not to put powerful tools in the hands of everyone. The world isn’t going to stand still for anybody, and to try to freeze it in one area only invites bad things.

That said, I think that something like this should be avoided on general principles. And it’s not just that big money corrupts, which it does. Big money comes with strings. Especially government money. And after five years, there is such a structure built up around having that money that you’ll do almost anything to get the next grant. Your organization then lives for the next grant, not the original idea.

Shun $$$ from large entities that is given “freely”. There is always a cost.

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I’d go with the Harkyman, I have intense reservations about accepting large quantities of money to form a rigid plan and keep on driving it for the money. Dunno, doesn’t sit well with me.

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I Think blender could be finance by our community,if the
200 000 users give 1dollars every month i think BF will dev Blender and product other orange project.

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Dems: That’d be awesome. I dunno if you’d get 200,000 users though, cause a lot don’t have a penny to their name.

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By 2012 I think Blender will be flowing through the roof with new features with each new release considering how development accelerates.

A plan to take Blender through 2012 may be lofty due to the time involved but could be a good idea.

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Shun $$$ from large entities that is given “freely”. There is always a cost.
Hmm. I dunno about this. Arts and science grants, which may be private or government but are more often than not from some government, are what fund the freest projects, from what I’ve seen. If you can get private funding to do something non-commercial, with no onus to pay the money back, and with no promise required of successful results, then by all means, go for it, but good luck finding that kind of thing. Whereas grants are usually exactly that kind of thing.

To be honest, getting grants seems a lot less scary to me than, for example, funding a film by DVD pre-orders. What if the production tanks? If it was a grant, then nobody gets hurt. The grant money got spent by the deadline, you write the final report on it and keep the receipts, and it’s all good. The hard part is getting the grant(s) in the first place. Once you get it, you’re golden. Whereas if it’s DVD pre-orders and the project goes belly up, then lots of people want their money back. If it’s private investors, well, you probably want to be very clear on what happens in that contingency when they sign on… That could get ugly.

Almost all academic work is funded by grants. And of all people, nobody covets their freedom more than academics. This is not a coincidence.

As for 5 years being a long time to plan, well, obviously it is if you’re talking a very specific degree of planning, but that’s far more specific than a grant application is looking for. I think it would be easy to list a half a dozen things that would be desirable to see happen with Blender in the next five years, both in terms of the software and in terms of the bigger picture. A recode of the event system and interface. Full integration with Renderman and at least one top-flight non-photo realistic renderer for animation. Full support of Chinese and Japanese and thorough internationalization. A professional quality introductory DVD tutorial series, for sale through the Blender shop and available for free to highschools (grants people are suckers for that “giving back to the community” stuff)… Another open movie. Maybe an open feature film, just for the sake of keeping up with “world’s firsts”. An open MMORPG. Full integration with Verse (and fuller development of Verse itself). Funding for some of the most promising cutting-edge academic CG work to be implemented in Blender, as we’ve seen with magic fluids and Angle-based Flattening.

If you think that 5 years is too long to plan, consider this: we probably won’t have all of those things in the next 5 years. It’s not really that long a time.

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No real opinion, both sides make good points. I’m just thinking, it’s been a very long time since the blender foundation had a fund raiser. Before deciding weather or not they actually need external funding maybe they should test the waters to see if they are sea worthy. A large population of users out there who would be willing to send around 5 or 10 dollars anyway. That kind of money isn’t really anything to sneeze at. An anual fund raiser can go a long way to financing and leaves you with the freedom to change course if you think you need to.

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someone said “would like to have a ‘Starter’ or ‘K12′ Edition of Blender for schools where ‘less is more’. I think it would make Blender a better teaching tool.”

why not,it would be grearfull

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Why stray from the path your taking if it’s allready working? You are getting enough money, right?

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Who is “you”? Right now, Ton is the only person being financed to work on Blender, the rest is done completely on donated time and is reliant on people’s schedules and budgets. At least speaking for my insignificant self, I personally would have been doing a lot more work on Blender recently if I wasn’t broke and trying to find work :slight_smile: . From what I know there have been other cases like that too. I don’t think that people who work on Blender are entitled to be paid for it, but on the other hand, getting some funding could be instrumental in getting some larger projects off the ground.

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Just when I have formed an opinion to post, I read a new one and cease typing and click cancel. So I’m gonna type real fast. As qualification to speak, I built and ran ITG, which was a $5M/yr software development company. We wrote the software for two dot-coms, so I know a little bit about this topic.

I think the debate is “If government funds a project, is it still Open?” I think legally, OpenSource is people donating their work to the public domain. The spirit of OpenSource is little guys workin in their spare time, but there are full-blown companies (RedHat) built on a product that is essentially free. Their employees are still paid and make money to live and do it full time and are well compensated for their effort. That money can come from support fees, packaging and distribution convenience fees, donations, charitable contributions to their company or themselves individually, speaking and teaching fees, and yes, government subsidies. So, in order to figure out this question, I think we need to separate the money from the art produced, and “will taking money from the EU create a situation where Blender will be hurt?”

Well, let’s say we do it and submit a proposal to include some topic like stretching and fracturing into Blender, and it is accepted. We get a million dollars to spend over 5 years. $200K per year average. We budget $100k for the first year, ramping up to $300k the last year. That means we have about three people on the payroll (salary, taxes, modest benefits, travel) and have to pay rent.

Dismal case: upon hearing of the award, people like Bob get pissed off they cant get hired, Broken finds a real job and is not available, and stop writing cool code like more nodes. I stop writing the wiki cause now I figure it’s someone else’s job, even though it isn’t. In other words, we misinterpret the intent and result of getting the grant, and Blender suffers. In the meatime, Ton and two others spend the grant money to get Blender to do X, it’s just that as a result, X becomes the direction for future releases of Blender.

Worst case: After five years, we don’t get another grant, and the three people quit to go find other jobs and become spare time contributors like, well, like they are now! In the meantime, Blender has had three man-years of dedicated effort and has some great new feature and can be applied to a whole new area, like manufacturing studies and simulation for visualizing stress when deforming pressed parts, or whatever. Users all over the world have new features to use.

Medium Case: because of these wonderful new features, Opel gives the BF a grant of another million to further the features and extend them into simulating friction inside the Game Engine. And so we retain those three employees, hire another, and continue to make regular releases. We don’t shun the people that are adding cool sculpt features or making more nodes; there is no reason they would not want to keep going, because the grant is directed toward a set of features that they don’t care about. Or even if they do care about the funded effort, they can still donate time and work with a full-time employee.

Best Case: We get a grant from five companies, go public, hire a staff of 20, and offer fee-based support in addition to all the support they can already get, features roll out fast and furious, and we merge with RedHat through a reverse leveraged buy out.

OK, so if we communicte well, and treat the grant money as ADDITIONAL effort and resources, the Dismal case will not happen. For all the other cases, Blender is better for it. So I say we try to get a grant by doing up a proposal. And besides, the last 6 months of the period will be spent trying to get another grant and won’t affect Blender at all. And Ton gets some great dinners and speaking engagements as part of the inner circle. Big deal.

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The spirit of OpenSource is little guys workin in their spare time

Although I’d agree that that’s a popular romantic notion of open source, my own take on the spirit of open source is that of freedom, having the freedom to do what you like with the source code of the application. And I think that’s freedom to and for all, whether it be paid people in huge companies or students in their bedrooms. It doesn’t have to be about the underdog vs the man, I think perhaps the world would be a better place if everyone including both the underdogs and the big powers embraced more of the ideas in open source.

Anyway back on topic, I’m not trying to argue either way, and I don’t even live in the EU so it’s perhaps not very relevant for me personally, but I should note that it wouldn’t be the first time that Blender development has been funded by grants.

The EU were already supporting the Verse development (though of course with a large administrative overhead), and we’ve already had two years of quite successful Google summer of code projects, which were all made possible by the grants given by Google. So we do have some experience in what sort of backlash there would be due to money being involved, and it’s hasn’t really had a big detrimental impact on the project, at least as far as I can see.