It was announced today that Adobe has officially joined the Blender Development Fund as a corporate Gold member to provide funding for future Blender development.
This means that Adobe will be paying around €30,000 a year joining the likes of Facebook, Epic Games, NVIDIA, AMD, Unity, AWS, Tangent Labs, Ubisoft, Intel, Google and more in ensuring that Blender can continue providing some incredible free and open source software.
In the announcement both gave short statements:
“We are thrilled Adobe is joining the Blender Development Fund to help ensure the longevity and success of this dynamic open-source community.” said Sébastien Deguy, VP of 3D & Immersive at Adobe. “We’re excited to help strengthen and improve this accessible suite of tools.”
“This is a great step forward,” says Blender founder and chairman Ton Roosendaal, “it’s a prime example of the industry increasingly accepting to work with free/open source software.”
Adobe did release their own announcement separately where they announced two new plugins with Substance 3D in Blender and Mixamo Auto-Control Rig Plugin for Blender.
At time of writing the Blender Fund shows they're getting €139,899 a month in funding. To some it might sounds like a lot but that amount of money for such a huge project really isn't much, and spread between different developers it quickly goes down. Wonderful to see more companies truly appreciate open source software though, Blender is a real poster child for how it can be done.
Sorry just, as a graphic designer, seeing something I hate so close to something I love, I panicked for a moment there.
Well, another day, another Blender victory, Blender is OP!
I really don't know how to process this information...
I mean, this is excellent news for Blender, further pushing this amazing free and open source software to the forefront...
But all these big name companies "investing" into this program as of late... I don't know, something doesn't feel right about this... this is my conspiracy part of my brain kicking into gear, always questioning everything I come across.
Last edited by ecosvaldo on 20 July 2021 at 4:01 pm UTC
They can't lock us out of using Linux, but they can lock up who is in charge of the kernel by buying into the Foundation, and then we're stuck with whatever they put out unless we want to go back five years. Adobe is just doing the same thing with Blender. They want to use it for something, trust me, and when it comes out it will be buggy as hell and crash all the time, but because of the workflow professionals will swear up and down that they cannot use anything else, just like every other damn piece of software Adobe publishes.
Quoting: whizseShould we start some sort of betting pool on who is going to sponsor Blender next? Autodesk? The NRA? NAMBLA?
Oracle?
Scummy software publisher who pioneered customer-unfriendly subscription-only rental software tries to improve public image by donating a miniscule amount into an open source project, that they might be doing for a self-serving, ulterior motive.
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