Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor.
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@Blender Some of the most miserable news I've heard out of software lately.
Taking the US Military Industrial Complex's blood money is reason enough to switch tools.
Giving corporate AI slop-peddlers influence over what features the devs are to prioritize doesn't give me faith in the tool's future either.
Fucking shameful.
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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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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!
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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 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
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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 definitely got some negative feedback , comparable to past corporate memberships. Which is normal, and once clarifying that this is just a donation, there was understanding.
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@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.
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@noondlyt Blender has accepted a lot of corporate funding over the years. In the press release we try to make it clear that this donation will be used at Blender's discretion, but the origin of the donation is very much not appreciated ideed.
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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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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!
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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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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!
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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!
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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 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?
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@fsiddi Let’s ignore the lost trust and users in the replies here saying they’ll never use it again. Let’s also ignore the lack of clarity about any strings attached, or Blender’s ethical alignment.
How much did they give? How much in donations has been lost since the announcement? Is it going to be significantly more than people would give for this to *not* happen? Even if it was, is that worth it?
It may be too late, but I’d like to see transparency about how much was donated. Any discussions with them around the donation. A return of those funds. A clear and explicit policy about AI contributions in the codebase, ideally forbidding them (but there already are some, which calls into question code licenses and ownership). After all of the above, and if done in the right spirit to support open source and artists, and with significantly better comms, I’d like to see a donation drive with the goal of beating the anthropic contribution.
