While in another thread I wondered maybe this a problem area for Blender.
People with the knowledge (but lacking the time) want some reasonable reward for their time and efforts.
Though its source code is opensource, how to ‘pay’ / ‘reward’ in a far way individuals who contribute to Blender ?.
Unlike companies who can have a fair income from digital productions, or creating other software and using cycles, a lonely coder is not in such a position. And often he doesnt get much attention either for their crowd funding.
Perhaps a weird idea… maybe provide funds for blender market ?.
Or maybe some kind of a wider reward system where people can reach levels and each level grands a virtual coin or so. So not literal paying in money, but in rewards to spend on blender market.
Maybe it would encourage more people to write code ?. or to do review work ?. Or to do bug fixing.
Its just an idea, i wonder if its a good idea or not.
@BearBaron its because lots of people barely can make a living these days, at the end of the month there is not much left.
Money is nice sure to get but can be difficult to give away even if you think someone deserves it.
And that’s what what Geogrpric seams to address
Other reward systems are possible.
For example Technet has bronze silver statuses apparently people enjoy helping others and write articles to get points.
The same for StackExchange, there is a reward system and people seam very active on it.
SoloLearn (programming learning site) has various reward systems (diploma’s points) all for free.
Well lots of sites have rewarding systems, also leveling up in games for example is a reward system, we humans want rewards.
People learn and read chess book’s just to improve their ELO reward.
And money or beer well, i’m not such an alcoholic and i just reach to the end of the month.
Many others dont have lots at the end, so a system that is not based on money not putting others in dept.
But a system that has a reward in code/pluing sharing seams viable, i mean people can put plugins on blender market.
While individual core developers cannt make anything out of it, its open source and there is no reward for them.
It might be an interesting option
But maybe i’m a bit biased since i was coding alternative denoiser; but yes i think i would like that.
In principal it’s not a bad idea if you offer such things from blender cloud etc for courses or assets that you can download of commercial grade.
But as i can tell you right now this second, There is no replacement for Cash.
But a nod and wink from Blender foundation (hence blender cloud etc) for £500 -£1000 of free resources or Cloud rendering would clearly be an extra incentive to develop for blender even if your not part of the core clique that normally run the show as paid devs.
But at the end of the day, Everyone needs to be able to exist. Im an artist and to be honest would rather be doing that than writing code 75% of the time, But the reason i taught my self to code was i wanted long term to start a games production company, And if you dont know what the value of code work is from experience you can get raped pretty quick, you need to understand the value and difficulty of work in code to value it.
Most people on here wouldn’t even part with a penny if they could avoid it, As they never had to A) do it them self or B)pay for it to get what they want, or else they would just go the autodesk route in the first place.
Blender foundation definitely needs to find a better way to incentivise new development from non core devs.
Lots of people also have enough disposable income to support developers. I refuse to believe that it’s all starving artists in here.
Having said that, software development does cost a lot of money, so if the community can’t support it to a larger degree than it already does, then you’re not going to solve that by inventing different kinds of not-money.
Other reward systems are possible.
For example Technet has bronze silver statuses apparently people enjoy helping others and write articles to get points.
The same for StackExchange, there is a reward system and people seam very active on it.
How do you know these two things go together? People enjoy helping others and writing without any points whatsoever. People also enjoy writing code without any “points” or “rewards”.
I’m not ruling out that some developers would do more actual work just to raise some arbitrary stat, but that’s not a “reward”, that’s exploitation of an obsessive-compulsive disorder.
If you don’t have money and you just want to thank a developer for the work they did, I would suggest writing a personal letter that tells how their work helped you in your life. That’s much more meaningful than hitting “+1” or “thumbs up” on some website. However, if you do that, don’t ruin it by asking for something!
have places where developers post what they want to code, and a price qoute. people contribute money and if goal is met the coder starts work and can get the money and code the thing.
the issue is you would want a approval system so only veted coders with a history of accepted patches could join, and depending on the code, the bf would need to approve the idea,
As developper,
i try to avoid blendermarket as i feel selling open source code simply is a non-sense and often lead to hidden sources wich is against GPL.
Selling services like customisation, presets, material libraries, assets, must be the way to generate incomes.
Doing so, rewards are based on real users needs, so a “natural selection” without any external influence does all the work.
It would be very interested to hear how the Blender Market coding assets are violating that GPL. So far I haven’t seen anything like that.
It is okay for artists to make money with open source software, but not for developers? Is the development never for real users needs and as such never worth money?
It’s good to see other people try to thing about solutions for a real problem. Note however that their are different case. Coders who don’t have a job yet and are looking for one can use the way the BF offers: work for free for some years to prove yourself, then get a job. Of course it works best for people with time and money like students who have their studies funded or anybody with enough money to take a time off.
I’ll speak for myself as I don’t want to pretend to represent all the others, but I think it will help to understand nonetheless. As long as my tenants will want money every month for my flat, the market and supermarket money for the food, the artists money for their assets, etc. I’ll need also money.
As a coder with patches already in cycles, I already have a free access to the cloud. It’s a nice plus, but it doesn’t allow me to work less at my day job.
While there are still society models on earth that are not based on money, they are very rare. Money is a reward system and is in fact already widely disconnected from any reality, but it’s plus is that people have however still trust in it and offer a relatively good security you can get some things you need and even more things you don’t need with it.
Regarding the code done for fun on free time, free assets like the blender cloud already offer, but extended to the blender market would indeed be a great plus. But for requested features and code that require a lot of time, real money is still the best way. As BeerBaron said, the problem is more “how to get more people to fund?”. I think the community can do a lot here with Advertising on social media, speak with big websites, etc. From experience, it takes a lot of time to make a campaign, answer questions and concerns, spread the word, etc. If the community does it, the coder can then concentrate on what he does best. Some people already did in my thread and it really worked.
So the solution is here, it just has to be spread. Funding helps, getting other to do so by saying how helpful it is to you with examples of what you did is also really helpful.
My two cents is that unpaid volunteer devs help out to contribute to, and to feel a part of, a community. They will keep doing so if they feel welcomed and appreciated, and will stop and leave if not. So I think it would be helpful to specifically target that desire to belong and be appreciated by giving out a special “Blender Developer” t-shirt after a number of accepted commits. Paid for by a separate fund set up for that purpose.
Possibly incorporate date-specific events so there might be a different design for “2.8 Development Sprint” of whatever. Different designs for module owners, Summer of Code mentors, wiki editors, etc.
I think you’d be surprised how much work volunteers will do for a cheap trinket, because it represents something of greater value: a “thank you”.
‘My two cents is that unpaid volunteer devs help out to contribute to, and to feel a part of, a community. They will keep doing so if they feel welcomed and appreciated, and will stop and leave if not.’
Until they get older and have bills to pay for (sorry for the possible sarcasm).
If someone goes for ‘likes’, will maximize the ‘likes’ with the goal with his development.
About 5% of Blender users earn money with Blender (on daily level what could it be? Half percent?)
The problem here is that people who use Blender to earn money (aka professionals) want specific features for a professional workflow to aim, which is - most of the time - is not a ‘like-generator’ as hobby users don’t need them.
Example: when I started to use Blender, it had a texture limit for CUDA. Almost all hobby users was fine with it while 5 years before that in Max I worked with hundreds of textures… If hobby users are aimed, ‘cheap’ like generators win and there will be no guarantee that an addon will ever be maintained.
Let’s see with an example: Blender lacks Multi mesh edit, what would be a pretty basic and necessary feature, Max has it from the start.
There is an addon to make it possible, but it renames the mesh data.
I wrote to the author months ago to ask him to fix it, no answer. I would pay for it.
I asked Blender devs to extend to the display (popup) of material names like 1-2 years ago. AFAIK it affects nothing. Nothing happened.
There is where this kind of funding makes sense. Making things happen when needed, not when someone want to have ‘likes’.