Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor.

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@the_wub I don't have personal experience with Bforartists. From what I can tell, it is a soft fork of Blender. This means it is very much dependent on whatever the Blender Foundation does and 'just' builds UI changes on top of that.

@Blender

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@JoshuaACNewman @Blender They've had Meta and Google as sponsors for years. Didn't change Blender, just more funding for development. How are they different?

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@the_wub @Rakkom @Blender Might be a way to find out: https://github.com/Bforartists/Bforartists/issues/6506 (Please don't pile on and try to do only thoguhtful responses.)

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@Blender ah plmdds mama aqui ó glub glub

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@Rakkom @Blender Yes, I realised that after reading a bit more after I tooted.

But it seems that Blender already is using AI generated/reviewed code.

So an AI-free fork would have to start from an older release.

Therefore using Bforartists would not change much.

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@ninjadodo @Blender
Are Google and Meta dedicated to destroying art and artists?

For them, it’s an unintended consequence that they don’t understand.

For Anthropic, it’s the heart of the business model.

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@SecondUniverse @Blender there's the blender for artists fork, gonna try and find out their position: https://github.com/Bforartists/Bforartists/issues/6506 (please try to respond thoughtfully if you happen to comment)

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@Blender ratio

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@mynameistillian @Blender how hard could it be to create another 3d modeler/animator, cutting from the project anything that's tied to a corporation?

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@Blender what the actual fuck

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@Blender Whatever they paid you in the short term won’t be worth the long term consequences. #slop

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@fsiddi did you not think welcoming and posting such a whitewashed description of a company that has pirated the work of many of your users, your coders and your existing donors might just be a teensy bit of a reputation-nuker?

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@Blender THIS SUCKS SO MUCH

I have NEVER seen a toot with THAT MUCH replies and *every one of them* is telling you not to do it (except one I think).

PLEASE DONT DO THIS. As other said, you are going to, in ONE INSTANT, sabotaging DECADES of community trust.

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@Blender Boy that ratio...

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@leroy Meta is already listed as a corporate sponsor on their funding page (and has been for a long time), as is Google and also Adobe. Seems no different.

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@fsiddi @titania is it just a donation? The announcement I saw said they were becoming a corporate sponsor.

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@Blender the complete picture is that you accepted funding from the leopard eating faces party. Please reconsider.

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@Blender They sure as shit aren't doing it for the benefit of you, the community, or anyone else on Earth. Only themselves and their investors.

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@dfyx They're also sponsored by Google and Meta. ‍️ Not that ethical either.

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@fsiddi
@Blender

I appreciate you opening your feed to this discussion. I suppose my central concern is that in an open-source project such as Blender, the community aspect is vital, as that's after all where the work is done. Blender's community, who have worked on this for so long, are a melange of extraordinary artists and programming savants -- neither of whom are in the same moral alignment as groups such as Anthropic, who make a point of seeking to replace artists, writers, and coders.

While I understand that your funding policy specifically states that those providing money to the project will not influence its roadmap, and I certainly expect that this is your intention, unfortunately, the open source community have been burned on a wide variety of circumstances much like this one, where the alignment of a project shifts to the people waving money. The intrinsic way in which this happens is for the project leaders themselves to be influenced by the funding, and I will assume that you're on guard against that; one extrinsic way is that members of the community who are against this source of funding will themselves leave, causing a gap in progress which may well be filled with bad actors and those who are more aligned with the funders' goals.

At the moment I can see no viable means by which to thread the needle: Blender is on a precipice, in which either the money is refused and the community tentatively rejoins, on guard for another such effort, or in which Blender take the money and the community fracture, as we've seen in numerous FOSS projects.

Make no mistake, I and many others see this as an outright betrayal, especially with Anthropic's efforts to use Blender for its own, if you'll pardon my language, sewage system of generated content. I would simply like to know: will the project continue with the community built over the last two decades, or will it discard them in favour of a corporate attachment which, even in the absence of direct malice, will cause untold harms?