The power of Ton in BF

what are the power that ton have regarding development of blender, I am just curious anyone knows or have a link?

thks for those who answer

In Ton’s words he’s ‘absolutely powerless’

Having the last word on what goes or not goes into trunk isn’t my definition of “powerless”; it instead fits very well the one of Benevolent Dictator for Life.

A note to the wikipedia article: in it is stated that should the dictatorship become less benevolent and more Fearless or Dear :evilgrin: forking will fix the problem and we all know how practical and doable is to fork a huge and under development code base…

I don’t know how much of a dictator Ton is, but I read that coloured wireframes and selection highlighting is not in blender because it contradicts his vision.
I am not fond of these decisions, but I respect Ton and all the work he’s done to get blender rolling.

Yeah, I don’t buy Ton’s claims about being “totally powerless” either. I’m sorry, but if you can & do veto code getting into the trunk of code that becomes the official Blender release - that’s not powerless. If you can (& do) do this at times because the code violates your views of what Blender should be and how it should operate, as opposed to reasons of code quality, then I think seriously claiming you are “totally powerless” is bordering on the disingenuous.

I know Ton is a good developer and I believe his vision has helped make Blender the success it is… but that one particular claim of his kind of grates on me. If he truly intended for us to believe that, and it’s possible he was simply dissembling, he’s either dishonest with us or dishonest with himself. It’s fine & dandy to be a Benevolent Dictator in open source projects, in fact I think successful ones need such a leader, but you can’t refuse to allow changes to Blender due to your vision of what it should be & then claim that has nothing to do with actual power over the project. :no:

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So you want Ton to be powerless?

My crystal ball says this thread going sour really fast.

I agree with ton on selection highlighting not being too great ( and many people as well), wireframe colors though could be an option.

I am contributing to Blender development for 5 years already, very active. Ton was always open for my contributions and ideas.
Also to be fair, he barely intervenes with development these days, we developers (paid or active volunteers) have a lot of freedom.

On the other hand it’s great to have someone saying “No”. In most cases he is not against the idea of something, but more about the implementation. You guys want features, sure, but we developers are the ones who have to maintain it. So we should not accept every patch just because it looks nice or you think it’s awesome. Code quality and design is important too.

good points !

What Ton means is that the devs are stubborn people, not code monkeys who write code according to his specs. He leads the development of blender by making it financially possible and by making sure that there is good communication between devs. He is not a manager who decides what the targets are for each dev. So compared to the management of commercial software he is powerless. Ofcourse he is not truly powerless, because he can decide what goes into trunk and most devs won’t go as far as forking to make a point. But for me, it was completely clear what the point was that he was making in the talk. So calling him disingenuous is unfair imho.

your the chairman, you write the check, you got the wallet and yet you are at mercy of the employee

I don’t buy it.

if ton is the chairman is there a board, wiki definition of foundation theres’ a board (correct me if I am wrong).
and by looks of it blender future is at the hand of the developers or maintainers and ton is at their mercy.

btw take a look at this, this is much harder to develop and I like what their doing…community has the power
http://community.reactos.org/

and if you like you can support it too and spread it to opensource community.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I understand, the devs are not employees of the bf. They are freelancers. They get paid to code blender, not to do what Ton says.

As to the wiki definition of a foundation, that is not really relevant, as bf is a dutch stichting. A stichting indeed has a board, which needs to contain at least a chairman, a secretary and a treasurer, but dutch law allows the last two function to be combined in the same person, but the statutes decide whether that option is allowed for the stichting. It is important to realize that a stichting does not have members. If you want to know how these things are arranged, the statutes are publically available and the chamber of commerce.

peer by peer, and it can take time. for example the Robert Penner’s easing functions, took 4 years or something :slight_smile:


Ton is powerful indeed.

My opinion is that there are two different Tons. One likes to say and push one thing on any given day, and the other Ton says the opposite and pushes against it on another day. I have seen comments from him which claim blender is open for everyone, and then a month later that autodesk users should pass right on past blender, that they are not the types he wants using it. That all feedback is welcome, and yet later certain feedback isnt welcome, usually under the claim that blender isnt a “x alernative” or not wanting to make “blender like application Y”. Theres a lot of back and forth. He recently pushed the idea that each of these teams will be working independently, calling the shots in their given area… but when the UI team started designing more conventional features, including the tabs, he didnt seem to be all that willing to let it happen. The pushback was enough that it did happen, but in a very limited scope it seems. There was also the case where he wanted to enforce moderation and the banning of members because comments or lines of thought were labled “poisonous” which is entirely subjective and based on personal bias.

This is my perspective though, it is opinion, it is subjective, so take it within that context. I do not expect everyone to agree, nor should they.

At the end of the day, I think he is a genuinely good person, trying to do what he percieves as being right, but is also probably not aware of his inconsistency with what is said and what is done, much less how it can be percieved. He got blender started, but might have trouble letting it go to grow up on its own a bit, and that would be understandable given the history of Blender.

Some of the developers are actually hired as full timers for the BF. Its not all freelancer or volunteer based. This isnt a bad thing though, its more about how the volunteer work is accepted or used that is key.

No. Never said that either. I am simply pointing out his description of how much power he has is in direct contradiction to his exercise of that power. My post wasn’t about whether or not Ton should have the power he wields over Blender’s development. My post was pointing out that he does have that power and his statement otherwise is patently & obviously false.

Well, it wasn’t as clear to me as it apparently is to you. His “I’m absolutely powerless” statement was made in context of people approaching him for the purpose of convincing him to allow, accept, or encourage changes to Blender (hell, he even mentioned the context of user interface).

He didn’t say he was powerless because developers are stubborn, that’s actually something incidental to the position he was taking from what I can tell (I’ve watched this talk several times now… this subject has come up a few times :wink: ). When he asks the audience whether they think he makes decisions on Blender’s development, he acts surprised when the room says yes. He then picks one person, asks them why, then tries the argument that because the code is open source and can be developed by others, his position has no power. That’s complete & utter bollocks.

Ton’s position is like saying Linus Torvalds has no power over Linux because the code is open source and can (even is) developed by others. Any reasonable, honest, & objective view of Linus & Linux accepts that he has great power over the project, same goes with Ton & Blender. There is nothing wrong with having this power, hell there is nothing wrong with not wanting the responsibilities of that power, but to deny that he has it, to me & others, is disingenuous.

FWIW, it’s the biggest bug-bear I’ve ever had on the project & it’s leadership (and remember, I’ve been one of the “left click to select” agitators for over five years :wink: ). Honesty is a big thing for me and even when in violent disagreement with the direction of Blender’s interface / development - I always & fully accepted Ton’s moral right to be the guy making those decisions. He was the developer that brought it into the open source world & helped make it what it is today. It’s his livelihood & (cerebral) child for which he can & should be immensely proud… but Ton stating he has no power over it’s development is just dishonest (if not with us, than with himself).

Um, not quite. From the Blender website:

We currently employ a variating team of 4 developers for general support and bug fixing.

Those developers are indeed employees that Ton can (& does) direct in their efforts. Whilst clearly not all the developers are employed & under Ton’s direction, some of them are according to the Blender Foundation itself :wink:

Likely a fork would only work if many active developers forked blender away from something not under the leadership of the BlenderFoundation.

Custom wireframe colours per object and layer… I’be been pleading and praying for 7 years now.

It makes me want to cry at this point





could not resist

The statement by Ton about being powerless clearly seems a deliberate exaggeration to make a point in a particular context. I think it’s a good point, the fact is that Blender module owners get to make nearly all decisions about their module (even controversial ones). Don’t bother interpreting that statement literally, it was not meant that way.

Further: Yes, Blender is not specifically being designed to appeal to Autodesk users, that doesn’t mean we’re not open to them. Yes, feedback of type “please copy application X” is usually not very useful (and as part of design discussions potentially a copyright problem even). No, Ton is not impeding changes to the UI, he rightfully complained to the UI team (which includes me) when changes were done that were poorly communicated and had various problems, that’s all, no scope is being limited.

It’s fine if you disagree with decisions or how things are organized, that’s a matter of opinion. But the claims that Ton is being inconsistent or even dishonest, that seems based on misinterpretation/miscommunication or incomplete knowledge rather than opinion.