Today Anthropic joins the Blender Development Fund as corporate sponsor.

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@fsiddi
@Blender

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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@JoshuaACNewman @Blender Google and Meta are among the biggest drivers of AI in the world. They are no less bad than Anthropic.

If you draw the line at "Blender should never take donations from ANY company I disagree with" that line was crossed long long ago. They've also taken money from Microsoft and web 3 companies.

If they turned up their noses at corporate donations the way you're asking they would have basically no funding.

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@DamonWakes @Blender lmao they edited it to sound less excited

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@Blender NOPE I’M OUT. Fuck you guys. You were literally one of the most loved open source projects OF ALL TIME.

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@the_wub @Rakkom @Blender Update: sadly, they seem to be pro slop. Oh well, was worth asking.

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@ell1e @Rakkom @Blender Thank you for checking this out!

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@Blender Ah it seems that both Blender and thus Bforartists already use LLM code.

See:

https://github.com/Bforartists/Bforartists/issues/6506

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@gruni @Blender It does have a vibe of "Feed me, Seymour" when they start out fistfucking creative people, then begin running out of material to feed the content extruder and then go on to make sure the best tools are supported to keep the pipeline flowing.

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@Blender Ooooh that's a hard no.

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@Blender yo wtf

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@Blender Bad, bad move. Now I need to look for a competitor or a clean fork.

[mastodonmigration@mastodon.online]

@noondlyt @fsiddi

Wooh... so much for the no quid pro quo posturing. Breathtaking.

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@Blender This going how you thought?

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@DiogoConstantino @fsiddi

I do not understand the point you are attempting to make. This is an ethical argument.

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@Blender You might, perhaps, have noticed that you have managed to annoy quite a lot of people.

Perhaps you think this will blow over, and a week from now people will forget and you'll still have the money.

Perhaps you might be right. Perhaps.

But that money comes with a cost. A cost that your organisation has now aligned itself with a company of thieves, fascists, murderers, actively harming people and the world for greed.

You are now with them.

Think about that. See if it helps you sleep.

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@Blender

Luddites go "Waaaah!!!"

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@fsiddi @art_codesmith my 2 cents: I am having trouble seeing it as a donation. It's called Corporate Patronage in OP (completely different vibe) and comes with (good) publicity for Anthropic attached. When I donate something, I get nothing in return from the party I donate to. That's a donation in my book. What Anthropic pulls here is, in my book, transactional.

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@Blender@mastodon.social

You should be ashamed, for this and using AI in your code regardless.

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@fsiddi

Even if this is just a simple donation, it should have been clear just how devastating the damage to Blender’s reputation would be by accepting this “blood money.”

After all, we’re talking about a company that tramples on creativity and copyright, and colludes with companies that produce software to build fascist systems.

My question is, wouldn't it have been better to ask the community first whether to accept this money? A fundraising appeal stating, "We could receive $x from Anthropic - would you rather donate yourselves?" would likely have been more successful. Both financially and in terms of reputation.

Sorry, it was a horrible decision.

@art_codesmith

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@Blender@mastodon.social @seanking@woem.men

Blender already enjoys vibe coding unfortunately