From user perspective it becomes inconvenient and difficult to manage after a while. Less addons, more devfund please(to the users reading). I don’t want an in itself sim system, I want something that is fully in communication with geometry nodes.
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I think anyone having worked with Maya and its multitude of plugins can attest to the fact that it can make file interchange difficult. Additionally, every system living in its own bubble is less than ideal from a workflow perspective. I fully agree that an integration with geonodes makes the most sense. This is also from a user perspective btw, I don’t know much about development apart from what I read here.
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I think I understand and expected the responses so far, in the terms and context you describe. My perspectives/experiences in this field are the following:
Artist + TD
developer / researcher (algorithms, solvers, architectures and frameworks, pipelines)
business / analyst (freelance)
I may be new to blender, but not to 3D, vfx, DCC, big biz BS and politics, life, people, software.
I wrote a long reply, here is the compressed version, and it is not addressing lukasstockner97 but this abstract entity named “community”.
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Blender is NOT free, people invest time and money to maintain and improve it. May not be my money, yours or from the user who is only asking for features but will not even send feedback or read the docs before posting questions or complaints. Work/Time/Money still.
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Blender is not the only free DCC tool. Lets be honest, if you can read and go online, you pay zero for any of the big DCCs. So the whole “freee” thing is purely ideology based and no longer rooted in practicality on relevant scale. Some may call it noble, others socially relevant, but if you wish to (or simply MUST) get stuff done, it does not matter for the vast majority of active or potential users. Features, performance, ecosystem, support, documentation … all that matters a LOT more these days. This is not an opinion … in my opinion. Your target audience will show you, who you need to be. Not the other way around. Disney got it wrong. Blender? Do not know, cannot say. Yet. Can ask thou. But if your target audience is not business oriented (use blender to create for a living), then fair enough, no need to care about business relevant factors.
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Ideology aside, facts are facts. If perspectives do not change, either the world or the lens is not moving. I am glad, that it is not my place to guide blender. I recognize the complexities of decision making versus desires and life. It is not easy, it is not straight forward in so many ways, especially with blender. But again, facts are facts and the more you take cover behind a mission statement, the more you will be measured by it. It is tough to be the best in anything. And nobody should diminish the words in the face of a challenge. They have meaning and were selected, I hope, carefully.
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Nobody wins if potential devs get a salty welcome because they hint commercial interests. They might turn around and say: Okay then, other platform, project, whatever. No hard feelings, but you lost them before they even touch the source. If you can afford to, fine. If not, reconsider. Quickly. Educating them about the reasoning behind hesitant replies is fair and generous. Judgement is a different story and pretending to not share in service of a community and mission, which bases all their pride on sharing, is simply flawed logic. I see plenty reasons why some will not share info or help out, legit and sound (time, interests, ideals). But it can NOT be the mission, unless the mission is to be the only one. Please nobody say it is, that would make it worse.
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I am ONE person. A stranger to most, not relevant to any project, until I am. But how many people do I know, who will ask my opinion about blender and the community in dev or user context? Think about that, please. People talk, opinions form before facts are discovered or even researched. This is not a threat, it is again, a fact.
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Already said too much. Just imagine what the long version was like
I do not feel bad about this community or blender, yet. I want no free lunch and I want no love bombing, false sympathy or anything soothing or ego-stroking BS. I want true stuff. So respectful conflict is fine, different opinions are great (within reason) and my perspective is developing as well. I hope this is the last thing I will say about free vs. commercial code in blender ecosystem -.-
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I beg to differ.
The four essential freedoms
A program is free software if the program’s users have the four essential freedoms:
- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
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Noted, semantics. Your free is not the same as the one in my comment and, I fear, not the relevant one outside of ideology context.
Please, let us not continue this here. Wrong thread! Open up another one, if this must continue.
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Being user and being a developer are two different things.
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People are trying to help you to understand and adapt into free and open source environment.
This might be frustrating for people that have never interacted with FOSS before, but software license has a huge impact on development model. The more you are entrenched in corpo the harder it gets to grasp. FOSS land is not motivated by the same things that corpos and corpo people.
Judging from the amount of people with that background coming here, acting confused and trying to ‘circumvent’ GPL ‘issues’ and force proprietary development practices is just proving my point.
You can either understand how things are run in the FOSS land (not Blender-exclusive) and bring your expertise to FOSS or you can stay in the land of proprietary software.
@samplesex
Wrong. In the FOSS land you are both. You are the sole owner of your code copy. And that implies YOUR FULL RESPONSIBILITY for it.
From the standpoint of ownership yes, but not from the standpoint of contributing.
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I think I understand your perspective, but I think there is still a fundamental misalignment that goes back to the points I mentioned.
The goal of Blender also isn’t to get the biggest user number possible. If lots of people use Blender because they think it’s good software, that’s great and I love to see it. But in the end, if the choice is between promoting free open-source 3D technology and getting 5% more users, it’ll be the former.
Blender is in an unusual situation for open-source projects because it has grown to the point where most of its users don’t really care about the “ideological” aspect - they just use it because it’s free (as in money) and is good enough to compete with commercial tools even when ignoring their cost.
This leads to the dev-community vs. general community disconnect that I mentioned - most users are perfectly fine paying to get extra functionality because they have a pragmatic perspective, but the development and overall project coordination remains driven by actual FOSS principles. And personally, I am very glad that it is because that’s why I’m here.
Therefore, the arguments along the lines of “your audience might lean towards a competitor”, “this might impact your reputation” or “people might hesitate to develop commercial addons” don’t really matter all that much. Of course it’s nice to be popular, and we’ll do our best to make Blender more attractive, but not at the cost of compromising the actual mission.
You may think this is naive and overly ideological, I understand that. But well, it is what it is, and the people who are here (at least on the development side) presumably think the same - otherwise, they’d probably be making a lot more money working on commercial software.
Anyways, sorry for turning this into a FOSS ideology thread, it really shouldn’t be. These are just things that I keep noticing, and I feel like writing them down at some point is the right thing to do, and the context fit here. I’ll stop derailing now 
And to be clear, I am not judging anyone for developing software commercially, I’ve done it in the past and might very well do it again in the future.
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In the FOSS land you are free to choose where and in what form you contribute. And the others have the freedom to accept or deny your contributions.
Lastly - you absolutely CAN contribute to FOSS without coding knowledge. You can report a bug.
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i have a few programming questions but nobody even lets developers talk about programming and technical aspects and just attacks developers.
The first comment is “Are you going to give all of your code for free and nothing else matters?”
please let us ask about our technical issues and get some advice.
Can you let me ask my question, please?
your behavior is not helping the developer to work on Blender at all? did you even read your messages once ???
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If you’re not going to contribute to development, make it a paid addon and sell it.
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first i need answers to my question then we can talk about other things, it is blender Dev not only dev for blender core. am I right?
Just so it’s clear, these are some of the questions @Omid_Ghotbi is asking
Most people just read what’s happened recently, and so may not see your questions in the first post.
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this is because users attack me before even letting others see the end of the first post. i just showed the state of the addon and then asked my questions.
i never had the same issue when i developed for Maya, 3dsmax or Xsi in 15 years. how should i know if there is a war here to accuse developers and interrogate them about what their purpose is and whether they want to give their code for free or not?
I’m so disappointed.
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You have a point, the two of you have come in to ask some friendly questions and have been met with a frankly shocking level of hostility and “get with the FOSS train or get out”, not to mention all the armchair license lawyers. I’m disappointed, to be honest, I thought a lot better of the Blender development community than this. It would not hurt anything to be a little less hostile towards new interested people, the spirit of “FOSS or death” has led to the end of many projects before as contributors became an increasingly small, insulated, circle. Surely Blender developers know this danger and would be less eager to jump into it feet first
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Okay, I think there’s just a misunderstanding here.
The Devtalk forum is intended for discussing the development of Blender itself, not for questions regarding development on top of Blender.
In the case of the other software you mention, you wouldn’t even see the devtalk equivalent unless you’re an employee there. Blender is an open project, so things are run differently here.
However, that means that here is the wrong place for addon development questions - for that, e.g. the coding section on BlenderArtists or the Blender StackExchange might be better.
That’s why people asked whether the intent is to contribute to the core - if yes, this is the right place, otherwise it isn’t.
And sorry for the somewhat rough reception - there’s been a recurring pattern of people asking unrelated questions here, in the development chat etc. and expecting help, so some frustration about that might have boiled over here. Shouldn’t happen, sorry about that.
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I think enough has been said in here.
As mentioned before, this forum is the wrong place to advertise your add-on nor is it the place to discuss development of your add-on. If you wish to contribute to Blender, you’re welcome to create a new thread with the actual questions.
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