Following on from Ubisoft and Epic Games becoming Blender sponsors, NVIDIA have also thrown a bucketful of money into the ring.
Announcing it on Twitter, the Blender team said:
NVIDIA joined the Blender Foundation Development Fund at Patron level. This will enable two more developers to work on core Blender development and to keep NVIDIA's GPU technology well supported for our users. Thanks NVIDIA for the trust in our work!
As a little followup the Chairman of the Blender Foundation, Ton Roosendaal, mentioned on Twitter how they've worked with NVIDIA for many years already and that they're "very happy to see this being consolidated in Development Fund membership".
This is pretty incredible for the free and open source 3D creation suite used by tons of individuals and massive companies. From huge movies to video games and more, Blender is very popular and it's cross-platform across Linux, MacOS and Windows as well. Seeing more companies throw their weight behind open source like this is excellent.
With NVIDIA being at a "Patron" level, this means they're pledging at least €120k per year which means they're the joint highest next to Epic Games for supporting Blender through their Corporate Memberships system. According to their funding page, they now get around €82,471 per month. Somewhat amusing that their original goal was only 25K per month, with a 50K per month "stretch goal" they thought was quite ambitious and now they've cruised ahead of it. You can see Blender's funding information on this page.
If you want to try it out you can download it from the official site or Steam.
Still, open source has been doing the rounds recently, so who knows. I certainly wish them the best of luck.
Last edited by damarrin on 8 October 2019 at 5:12 am UTC
And as much as the business man in me see's the blatant exchange of resources and mutual interests usually described as "a job", "partnership", or "contract"...
Hell, mutual dependence and investment of funds into a FOSS project I am totally cool with. Thumbs up.
Last edited by titi on 8 October 2019 at 9:02 am UTC
Quoting: titiAnd I hope all this money does not put pressure on them so that we get new features in windows only one day :S:I would be surprised, given how Blender is used on Linux in big productions. Was big news years ago. Disney, Pixar and so on all use it.
It's much better for studios to invest money and development time into Blender than to do everything by themselves.
And Blender is my all time favorite software together with UE4. I just enjoy every moment using both of them.
Last edited by Power-Metal-Games on 8 October 2019 at 10:38 am UTC
See more from me