Blender, the free and open source 3D creation software has pulled in another major supporter, with Netflix now funding future development.
Announced on the official Blender website, the Blender team noted it will go towards general core development, to continuously improved content creation and tooling for individuals and teams working in media and entertainment-related workflows. Everyone benefits from this since Blender is completely free - awesome news.
Netflix have joined as Corporate Patron, the highest level membership for companies. This means at a minimum Netflix will provide Blender with €240k a year.
I’m mixed on this. While I love more money for Blender, I don’t like it when big companies invest a lot of money into open-source projects. They tend to treat the investment the same way stockholders treat corporations. At the same time Blender has become such a huge part of VFX in general that it’d be stupid not to invest in Blender. I’ve been using Blender for 10+ years and these days it’s just as robust, in some cases moreso, as most commercially available software.
My point is this could be a very good thing for Blender or a bad thing for the average user. We’ll just have to wait and see and hope for the best.
Wait until you hear who is funding Linux.
If blender has a good management, they will take the most from it, without becoming reliant, like mozilla became reliant on google.
I think it’s a great thing that blender is receiving this funding. Let’s just not fall into the trap of improving the public image of netflix
That’s the lovely thing about open source: if this ruins blender, the community at large can pivot and fork blender to allow it to thrive in the way the community wants it. In small projects this type of pivot can ruin the momentum of a project, but in large-scale projects they are a lot safer.
invest a lot of money
it’s only 240K.
The lowest donation in that tier is 240k, they could and are probably giving more.
A year though. That’s significant for visibility and long term planning.
the question is will they try to attach strings to it
So like 3 few full time developers. Neat.
