Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor.

[Gast]

@Blender another app I won't be recommending anymore...

[Gast]

@Blender

Nein.
Non.
No.
Nah.
Niet.

[Gast]

@Blender
harrobot:~ # zypper rm blender

The following 2 packages are going to be REMOVED:
blender blender-lang
[...]

Continue? [y/n/v/...? shows all options] (y):
(1/2) Removing: blender-lang-2.82a-bp156.3.12.noarch ..........[done]
(2/2) Removing: blender-2.82a-bp156.3.12.x86_64 ..........[done]

harrobot:~ #

[Gast]

@Blender oh ffs, when you were finally winning in this domain, you just destroy your reputation...

[Gast]

@Blender

Genocide ⟺ Blender.

[Gast]

@Blender ugh how unfortunate.

[Gast]

@Blender

[Gast]

@Blender no, it's not welcome

[Gast]

@Blender this is awful news

[Gast]

@Blender Do you really need to tarnish Blender’s (until now, spotless) reputation with this move? Not a single one of your users is going to be happy with this decision.

[Gast]

@Blender Blech.

[Gast]

@Blender What the fuck are you thinking? What next, the nazis?

[Gast]

@Blender Walk it back, pls.

[Gast]

@Blender Is nothing sacred anymore?

[Gast]

@Blender@mastodon.social for fucks sake, can you please not?

[lumi@snug.moe]

@Blender no-one wants this shit. please reconsider

[Gast]

@Blender doesn’t matter if they can’t steer the Blender project, they are con artists taking advantage of your organization’s legitimacy to score new marks.

[Gast]

@Blender Point to your policies all you want.
The correct choice here is to not accept the money, and to tell Anthropic & their ilk to go away. Take a meaningful stance against the companies that are actively hurting and stealing from the artists that depend on tools like blender.
Welcoming them, accepting their money, is a clear signal that you care more about the money than the people they harm - including many of your own users - to get it.

[Gast]

@Blender even if this does not give anthropic any control over blender, the messaging is tone deaf, especially on the fediverse. If you're going to accept money from a company as toxic as Anthropic, the announcement needs to at the very least critique them, not blandly heap praise for the donation. Community trust is hard to win and easy to lose, so I would think hard about the message this post is sending to your community.

[Gast]

@Blender Awful awful awful... Real disappointing and worrying.