What a shock, yet another short sighted view from someone who doesn’t understand the opensource initiative. As someone who actually does occasionally contribute to the Blender’s codebase, I fully understand how injection of capital into the process could lead to some serious benefits in the long term.
Blender moves forward on the backs of one paid coder and a whole swathe of volunteers. Unfortunately, this leads to a whole heap of cool features, but little of core significance, after all, volunteers want to spend time coding things that they enjoy coding, not, for example, some tool refactor. Oh and don’t forget, they do this in their own time, for other users as much as for themselves.
So maybe a user has a specific need for some feature, be it for a personal project, or work(as in getting paid) use, it doesn’t matter. If said person is willing to provide some motivation for a coder to come up with a result, then this is hardly undermining the so-called ‘intergrity of Open Source Software’.
The ridiculous conclusion you draw, brendon murphy, that Blender will need to be paid for as a result of funded work is seriously flawed. Did you stop to consider that BF will not accept non GPL friendly licensed code into the codebase?! Yes some scripter could charge licensing for a script, but seriously, who would pay up?
Flashing dollars at individual scripters may not make Blender Maya(is that really the point of the exercise anyway?!?) but it may motivate a scripter to add some functionality that people will use, it may pave the pathway to some innovative new feature, and it may not. But all that said, the point is that injecting money into the coding process is not going to harm Blender in the long term, nor is it going to change the the way Blender’s community effects the longterm outcomes of the program.
Furthermore, have you considered that the Google Summer of Code program is nothing more than a glorified bounty program? I hope you have never used Blender’s fulid simulator, because you’re destroying the sanctity of Blender and OSS since it’s a paid contribution. Oh and you don’t use subsurf do you? or any other modifier, or IK? What about booleans? Yep you guessed, all funded development. (In case you missed the point, I’m being sarcastic here)
Perhaps a quick glance at http://www.opensourcexperts.com/bountylist.html would impress upon you the fallacy that only fragmented efforts like Linux utilise bounties as a method of promoting feature development. In fact, some very well known OSS projects such as Python, Zope, PHP, and GIMP (to name a very small fraction) have and are benefiting from paid code development.
And you know making a stupid comment like ‘go buy max, it has good format support’ is not helping your argument. Why the hell shouldn’t Blender have good .dxf or .dwg format support? Because you say that someone doesn’t have a right to offer money as a reward for someone coding said feature? I think not.
Finally, the pathetic attempt to solicit sympathy by announcing your home situation to the world does not impress me, nor make me sympathetic. If you are in such a dire situation then perhaps an internet conenction (or usage of internet connection elsewhere) is not such a necessary commodity.
For the record, I, like cambo, have also offered money for a feature I wanted.
