Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor.

[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.

[Gast]

@Blender NOOOOOOOO! What the hell are you thinking? You're allowing Anthropic to whitewash its murder of everything you say you value. Don't do this.

[Gast]

@Blender fuck your company and your now-terrible product. I hope you all lose your jobs next.

[Gast]

@Blender@mastodon.social this is a horrible idea. people love and rely on blender and this represents spitting in all of our faces and destroying our tools

[Gast]

@Blender I have read both and I still don't understand why Blender is accepting financial dependence on a corporation that is actively destroying the open web with scraping, fueling the ongoing slop contribution denial of service attack against foss maintainers, is a major player in the industry that is actively harming digital artists, and numerous other harms; nor do I understand how you expect us not to be angry and heartbroken by this news. Perhaps you could explain it to us.

[Gast]

@Blender "to maintain and continuously improve (...) Blender Python API" does mean this preparing Blender to be used by AI agents? 🫠

Not exactly thrilled by this announcement..

[Gast]

@thibaultmol @UkeleleEric @eden @Blender

Dear young child of summer

No corporation gives you money without getting something in return.

[Gast]

@Blender

Even if... and that is a massive IF ... they have zero influence at the moment, the optics of accepting their cash is a shitshow on steroids. It looks like tacit acceptance at the very least, and it will likely come back to bite you in the ass.

Ya coulda just said, "Thanks, but no."

[Gast]

@Blender I did.

Fuck right off with that. I do not give a fuck about your excuses for accepting what is essentially blood money from a company that kills creativity and steals from the open source community with impunity. I regret ever giving a single dime to you and will not do so ever again. Fuck you. Fuck off.

[Gast]

@Blender I did read it. And I am sorry to say it but now I feel dirty to use Blender.

[blender@mastodon.social]

Note: partially reworded the social media announcement so it sounds less tone-deaf about the controversial nature of the membership.

[Gast]

@Blender This is so disappointing. What alternative exists now that Blender is taking slopcorp money?

[Gast]

@Blender FFS.

[Gast]

@Blender