Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor.

[Gast]

@Blender is the way. Fuck obstranists: the code is already dreaming of a future that doesn't include your permission.

[Gast]

@fsiddi do you have an option to refuse/return the donation? would you consider it?

[Gast]

@fsiddi People are mad at Anthropic right now (and I think reasonably!), but Blender has been also taking money from Google, Meta, Epic, Netflix, Nvidia and the likes for a while now, even if they, as we saw so far, got no say on the future of Blender.

Would Blender reasonably keep up its development pace comfortably if it were to let go of the dirty money from questionable companies?

I do understand that development costs a LOT of money and requires a stable influx. I also understand the uneasiness around the morality (and not only morality) of it. Though I also feel it was a bit naive that many (including me) thought Blender was becoming a powerhouse out of nowhere ^^" In a capitalistic world, capital will often inevitably come from unsavory places

[Gast]

@Blender ew

[Gast]

@fsiddi @titania Just a donation, right? RIGHT?

So I guess this announcement from today is completely unrelated:

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-for-creative-work

#Blender #Slop

[Gast]

@fsiddi @amosmulder Blender is one pole and its community is another.

[Gast]

@fsiddi @noondlyt ”This donation was brought to you by 120 murdered schoolgirls.”

Maybe put that on the splash screen in the next blender release so people know what you stand for?

[Gast]

@Blender

Another FOSS project tainted by AI corporation sponsorship.

Have fun swimming in money while you give zero hells about human creativity.

[Gast]

@Blender

Hope you can at least use some of the money to buy back some of the good will you burned.

[Gast]

@fsiddi

Bro, you need to resign.

[Gast]

@Blender perhaps not

[Gast]

@Blender Feels like

[Gast]

@fsiddi I am concerned that the backlash to accepting this donation is surprising.
The fury with which large parts of the tech and tech community hate LLM companies is not a secret.

[Gast]

@Blender accepting this money signals the people who work with and on your software that they do not matter.

[Gast]

@fsiddi
I'm gonna guess you not gonna stay the CEO for too long.

[Gast]

@fsiddi you miscalculated what partnerships the Blender community would condone, and now the project's reputation has been damaged.

1) What is your plan for rebuilding community trust in you personally, and the project's stewardship team as a whole?

2) Does the project have any guidelines for vetting donors? Are there any established criteria that would cause the project to automatically reject an offer?

3) Your were aware that the donor would be controversial. Was there any internal discussion about potentially not accepting the offer, or alternatively putting the matter to a community vote? If so, what considerations overrode these?

4) Are there any strings, explicit or implicit, on this donation? Does Anthropic get any influence that a non-donor company does not?

[Gast]

@bnut 99% people commenting here have never and would habe never used or contributed to Blender.
@fsiddi

[Gast]

@anthropy @Blender
I was under the impression that an opensource art-tool had an actual spine. That software made for artists actually respected art
(and human life, anthropic literally helped the US bomb schoolkids ffs)

The morally correct choice would have been to publicly announce that they refused.

They have funding, they don't NEED that money.
But like so many others they chose greed over integrity, they sold their users/souls for a quick buck.

I'm not surprised, just disapointed.

[Gast]

@Blender You're getting in bed with a company whose products are used to murder schoolgirls.

Give the money back.

[Gast]

@Blender the final frontier for slopification has been breached. it's joever