Wow. I dislike Facebook, and have left it years ago, as well as Instagram and WhatsApp. They all suck you into a never-ending craving for likes and replies. But I welcome any initiative that benefits Blender, its developers and its community.
Yep. Ton is very resolute in his aim for Blender: keeping it an independent project by everyone for everyone. I love such steadfastness and idealism. It’s rare in a world dominated by corporate power and greed.
Who are those defectors (and should we care)?
The problem with Facebook is not much of trying to control Blender or not, but using it as way to collect users data.
They can easily make an addon that do that & since they have a bad reputation on that matter it could affect Blender negatively on the long run and reduce it’s popularity because of it .
In that case, an outgoing connection from Blender would be necessary. First of all, any decent firewall would block that and notify you, and secondly, the Blender Foundation will definitely not allow user data collection from Blender.
Community content is what they need because it’s free and it’s limitless.
Blender has one of the youngest and largest communities so their move is quite obvious. I see it as something i like a lot getting more funds without nasty sideeffects. All good imho.
Blender Foundation can’t control how the addon works, there are plenty of addons that connect to web services…etc including Blender cloud. & if FB needs to connect to their products(VR, AR…etc )then they have all the rights to do so, this is the tricky part that users should be aware of.
Blender: “Hey , do what you like! Have some fun!”
Facebook: “You can only think and say what we dictate to you!”
Free spirit and suppression… great blend… (no pun intended)
Still, Blender community can identify a problematic addon and absolutely refuse to use it, no?
Sure they can. Unless there is a pop-up stating that you (the user) accept the terms and conditions of the add-on.
This is like be-friending a bad guy and inviting him to your house for a tour then letting your neighbours know, the Community can refuse to use it but at what cost?
No really, for example if the addon connects to another app then the terms would be different, the “pop-up” or just text would only say that this addon is trying to connect to this X app which has it’s own EULA.
At what? There’s no obligations on BF side as far as I know. Definitely no obligations on Community’s side. FB making an addon should have no more power than any other contributor sitting here in the Coding forum section.
Blender addons are technically bound by the GPL, a license which I would think is outright incompatible with a lot of EULA’s (because of their tendency to apply to products or API’s that are closed-source).
I understand the security aspect, but what we don’t want to introduce is a fascist system where only those with ‘correct’ ideology can share addons.
Even if the addon wasn’t optional somehow, even if facebook contributed malicious spyware code and every single one of the Blender devs signed off on this and accepted it into master, even if you had no firewall whatsoever, blender would be forked the next day, guaranteed. If not the day before. And there would be nothing Facebook or the BF could possibly do to prevent it.
Even if there was literally nobody to do this for you, and everyone loved Facebook’s new code except you, even then - YOU could for it yourself. It’s not terribly hard, there’s even graphical git interfaces these days.
Whosoever forked it would subsequently just have to take new commits from the BF’s git repo once in a while while leaving the bad code out, and there’s nothing the BF or Facebook could do to prevent that either.
This is what guarantees Blender will stay free and open, forevermore.
We don’t know FB agenda yet, so we have to wait & see the out come of this sudden “generosity”
I am not worried about free & open forever but more the bad rep that brings with it,BF wouldn’t benefit if that happens, that’s all.
I always love the weird conspiracy threads whenever a big company is throwing money at Blender. On this one, I can somewhat understand, but I am a bit biased, actually, Facebook has been sponsoring my Cycles project since July (which include the socket API refactor, BVH refit in OptiX, the patch for scene update optimizations currently in review (D9555), and some more to be shared).
For now they are only interested in getting Cycles to go faster for real-time-ish situations (AR, Occulus). I cannot really say more, and I will let them reveal things when they are ready. But the main focus for now is faster scene updates between frames, and BVH building optimizations which is the bottleneck, and that’s what I am working on. Those optimizations are mostly for viewport rendering at the moment, as we don’t have persistent data for final render yet, but once we have this, it will also be faster there.
(Note: I say Facebook is the sponsor, but I am still hired by the Foundation.)
… Old saying is that best way to rob Bank is inside job. Although I love to see that Blender get funds, I’m worried when some evil multinational corporation do this. Be real, free lunch do not exist, and this companies in one moment can make demands, or “push stuff in right direction”… with help of his people inside. This is old story. btw. such donations mostly are cut from company taxes, so they do not lose to much, but they put foot in door.
Look what Facebook do with his Oculus … so how you can trust such company?
All in all I hope that people in Blender are aware of this.
Facebook bought Oculus. For $2BN.
There is a huge difference. I assume that Facebook, like Epic, like Ubisoft, like all of the other corporate sponsors have some kind of use for Blender, and they want to support it’s development.
I get that FB aren’t the best, but why do we all have to go straight to the tinfoil hats? Some of the stuff here is honestly ridiculous.
Giving money for development doesn’t mean that Facebook now own Blender, just like Epic, or any of the others don’t. It also doesn’t mean that you’re going to have to login to Facebook to use Blender, or that they’re going to make some kind of plugin to collect your data (Even if they did, you can disable and enable every plugin in Blender…).
They’re just giving money to Blender to aid it’s development, that’s it. No trojan horse, tinfoil hat, Alice in wonderland rabbit hole nonsense…
Good lord, people…
Besides that, the amount they are paying will barely register on their balance sheet once they tally the billions they made and spent at the end of the current fiscal year. It is the corporate equivalent of throwing crumbs to a dog, but the dog (like Blender) is very happy to take what he can get (and it is in fact enough money to provide a tangible development boost).
Exactly. You’d think Facebook just donated a casual $50mil the way people are going. It’s, what, 100k? They earn that within seconds. As you say - crumbs to a dog…