I am not sure why @Manuel never mentioned this here to get some traction for the funding, but it looks as if he is done supporting it.
Here is his official word on it
This was also posted in the official Manuel Bastioni Thread but I feel it may get lost.
OG Thread
This is sad. Support for that project was more than deserved, especially by the people who were using it professionally.
Perhaps it lacked better publicize the campaign for funding? Had any new thread been opened about it in the forum? Did the news appear in Blender Nation?
It looks like he only posted on his website and Facebook. Not sure why he didn’t post here.
@Manuel, dude, I was totally unaware, this tool you’re creating was about to serve me for big projects in the years to come. I would definitely have supported it financially the way I could.
These news suck woodsticks.
I honestly think there have been branding and marketing issues from the beginning. The work you’ve put in the add-on is outstanding and this outcome is really undeserved but it may have been different if those issues were addressed upfront.
Is there no way it could be reborn under a different branding and different perspectives?
After all, 2.8 is a good time for rebirth of projects.
I would buy MBL 1.7 if it was an add on for 2.8. I hope this is not the end of MBL.
This is horrible. I didn’t know about funding options or I would definitely have contributed when I could. I was really looking forward to the new features.
@Manuel please don’t give up on this project.
I was totally aware of this situation and reached out to @Manuel to see if I can help with extra attention from BlenderNation. Happy to help, I know this project has many fans!
@Manuel, give another opportunity to the funding campaign, but this time with better publicity and communication.
Many people do not even use Facebook for these days. Even entering the Lab site on Facebook, it is difficult for me to find the news of the campaign for funding.
IMO, a company, a team effort could make it work. As most of such solo projects are just doomed (all for the same reasons).
Anyways, stay great.
@manuel Not a video announcing the campaign on your Youtube channel, not a post in blender.community, not a post here on BA, not even an RSS feed on your website. There was just no way I could’ve been aware of the campaign other than manually checking your website twice a week.
I ban twitter and facebook from my internet life and use free and open source alternatives. More and more people are doing the same, especially people who use free and open source software (like Blender) so please give them a chance to follow the news of your open source project!
@manuel I’m “proge” from kino3d.com I remember where it all started ten year ago or so on …
do you remember the first humanoid obviously ugly and badly done for the project? 
^ _ ^
This is a community where many people take the concept of not paying for software as a constitutional right and will out and out flame, slander and harass anyone who suggests they be compensated for their time (and maybe have something to put food in their bellies)…honestly the blender community got what it wanted, no one feels safe to ask for donations here and therefor people won’t ask for donations here.
Why not try this again and see how much funding could be reached. Perhaps it can trigger something with Bastion. He did ty the knot ofcourse, but perhaps it can help him and reach a goal he was hoping for.
What i do find weird, is that he posted about funding and than 1 week later decides to stop? That is a very small time frame.
It is. Maybe he had high expectations and was so surprised that he got frustrated and angry at the Blender community so he reacted a bit strongly.
The feeling is not totaly alien to me. Many years ago I was a member in a small linguistics forum devoted to correcting mistakes in and extending and modernizeing a language. I commented frequently and aiding with my knowledge. Once I asked about something in the general/off-topic subforum, a weeks later nobody replied. It really frustrated me, and I never commented there ever again.
While my knowledge was based on many books read and many hour spent constructing ideas which I gave away, it was still nothing compared to the effort put my MB in his addon (and previously in makehuman). But still, it frustrated me that not a single member wrote a single line, not even a “I don’t know”.
A few years later, when I had “evolved” emotionally, I reflected back and concluded I shouldn’t have jumped the gun. I don’t remember how many actually saw my thread in that linguistics forum during those few weeks. But considering that there were just a few people there, even if all of them saw it, that was way too few for me to expect to receive any kind of reply at all.
As a 3d-hobbyist, I like the MBL addon very much. While I didn’t use it much (I don’t have much time for 3d-hobby) I had fun while it lasted. And thanks to Manuel for all the effort. Nothing more to say.
This is very bad news.How many people does it take to pay this guy a descent wage? I´d easily pay him a couple of euros a month if I knew how.
@manuel
Expecting a “community” to support a project voluntarily generally doesn’t work out well. You’d be shocked how much critical computing infrastructure is, in some way, supported by the work of volunteers with no financial compensation on part of the trillion-dollar enterprises that build on top of it. That’s just the way it goes and there’s no point in lamenting it.
If you want to make money with FOSS, broadly speaking, you need to ask for money in exchange for providing added value. When it comes to companies, it doesn’t have to be a lot of value and shouldn’t be a lot of money. Getting a request for a 50$ item through purchasing is generally easy, getting the company to donate any amount of money is a process that likely doesn’t even exist. Negotiating support contracts or sponsorship as some might suggest is quite a hurdle, unlikely to succeed and not very scaleable.
One such piece of added value could be lifting the attribution requirement. Nobody except you wants that. I understand why you want the attribution, but to me it would just be more formalities and liabilities that are a tough sell to clients. I’m never even considering anything that has a CC-BY requirement (or a GPL/copyleft license for that matter).
Good Luck and don’t take the whole situation personally.
I have to say that I love blender. Im not a rich man but give what I can when I can as a way to say thank you to all the people who have done such a great service for so many people. Giving so many who otherwise would have no means to explore cg. I just fell onto Manuel Bastioni’s website . If Blender orgs ever start a fund raising for such open source Labs. I am open to give a donation to help scholarship these secondary contributions to blender. I do hope we all try to help give back to Blender folks such as this site and the current funding request Blender is asking for. a mere $6,00 US a month or one time donation is all they are asking for which is so little considering all that the many offerings that we receive from Blender.