Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor.
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1) Thinking about that
2) This has never really come up before
3) Lots of internal discussion and feedback gathering, but probably not enough
4) There are no strings attached or influence here. It's just money.@fsiddi @cczona i think if money did not equal influence you wouldnt be seeing this reaction in your supporters. its clearly influencing something. inducing this huge upheaval in your support base means proportionally more users supporters and contributors that are pro ai. the conclusions arent hard to reach.
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Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor. This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development. More details at https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/
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All right, Francesco here - CEO at Blender. I'm going to spend some time to try and respond. If you have direct questions or comments, reply here!
@fsiddi I think enough people have said enough things, but that will probably continue. Please take care of yourself and the team. Sometimes, it is literally that, a mistake. These are tough times for creative people, and many in the community do look up to Blender. They're understandably angry about this. To my fellow artists, we should remember there are humans on the other side of this, and as humans, try to give them a second chance.
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Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor. This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development. More details at https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/
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Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor. This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development. More details at https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/
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Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor. This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development. More details at https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/
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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?
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Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor. This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development. More details at https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/
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Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor. This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development. More details at https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/
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Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor. This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development. More details at https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/
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@netopwibby @Blender that’s not how donations work
@subterfugue @Blender The absurdity of comments don’t translate cleanly to sarcasm on the internet and DEFINITELY not on Mastodon (as you can see from other people who have responded to me with personal attacks).
It's whatevs.
When companies donate to FOSS it’s typically because they’re using the tech internally so I was more speaking to the wild possibility of Claude being able to generate basic models for prototyping.
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Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor. This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development. More details at https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/
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Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor. This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development. More details at https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/
@Blender Imagine telling your boss you got bullied on that "other" social media site, just for said boss to part of the corporate hive mind. Apparently the masses don't seem to like this idea very much. Yet in the eyes of marketing, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the other "more positive" social media sites that suckle on the tits of their corporate mother. If I were to choose a 3D Rendering program to use, this won't be my first choice anymore. Sorry, not sorry. Go home, you're drunk.
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Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor. This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development. More details at https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/
@Blender you’ve mishandled this.
Yes, the donation will benefit the foundation and should not result in giving anthropic any influence over the project
But,
(1) the real world does not work that way, and we all know that. Anthropic now has a relationship with blender. And that is poison to your mission.
(2) you should be ensuring that anthropic will never have influence and assuring us that you will personally see to it.
(3) you did not acknowledge that AI companies like Anthropic have been stealing the work of artists - your user base - to train their models. There’s a hell of a lot to address there if you are going to accept money from them.You should have rejected their donation very publicly because anthropic is a threat to your user base. Every ai company raises money on promising to destroy our jobs. While they are too incompetent to succeed YOU should take that seriously and take a stand.
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@Blender congrats on securing funding, I get this is important for opensource projects.
personally I don't get the outrage, Meta, Wacom, Nvidia, Microsoft, AMD, Adobe, Apple, and Netflix weren't scary enough but Anthropic does it?
how do people think opensource projects get funded -
Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor. This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development. More details at https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/
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Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor. This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development. More details at https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/
@Blender Honestly, I'm not sure which shocks me more: the sponsorship itself, or the fact that you're announcing it happily and proudly without considering how problematic it might be for your community.
Unfortunately, I'll take this as a sign of a pro-AI cultural shift at the Blender Foundation. What a disappointment. -
@amosmulder the idea is that we welcome funding towards the project, under Blender's condition. This usually has the support of the community. This case of funding is clearly extremely polarizing.
@fsiddi I appreciate you taking the time to engage with the community here
Please keep in mind that those giving feedback are the "seen" bit of the community, while the *whole* community iceberg will shift subtly over time from a decision like this, even if the number of users stays about the same
People who are ok with AI extracting value from FOSS (or OotL) may continue to use Blender more, for example, while I feel like no longer recommending Blender to students
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Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor. This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development. More details at https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/
