Difficulty donating to the Blender Foundation

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

In the spirit of that same honesty and transparency referenced in the original post, I will recount the unhappy story of my trying to support Blender.

It started on irc (as you may or may not know, Blender has a #blender channel on Freenone ; as you also may or may not know, there’s a lot more to the world than the web, and most important people doing important things can not be found on any webforum) :

Jun 23 07:34:51 <mircea_popescu> JA12 incidentally, what’s the best way to support the blender foundation ?
<JA12> mircea_popescu: buy blender related products and services, some of that money finds its way back to blender development fund. direct donation is also an option if you prefer
<mircea_popescu> didn’t see anything on the website
<mircea_popescu> i’m not too keen on this entire merchandising front
<JA12> mircea_popescu: blendercloud is one service/product directly related to foundation but partners also sponsor it
<JA12> mircea_popescu: it, as in blender development
<JA12> https://www.blender.org/foundation/development-fund/
<bigstu80> mircea_popescu I just paypal to the dev fund on a monthly basis as JA12 said

The most important thing you must understand about PayPal is that using it is worse than wearing baby otter fur while kicking around footballs made by five year old concentration camp prisoners hanging a foot above ground from steel meathools stuck in their eye sockets.

Yes, it is really that bad. PayPal is the enemy, declared and avowed, of everything that is good and right with the world, and especially ~ ESPECIALLY ~ any sort of creativity of any kind whatsoever. I won’t rehash their outrageous history of rape and pillage directed against the human spirit, suffice it to say I won’t ever use it, and the notion of anyone ~ ANYONE ~ involved in a creative endeavour of any kind, to any degree, using them is, again, beyond scandalous. Stop promoting your sworn enemies, yo!

That said, I am not a fanatic, and I understand that sometimes you have to drink water out of a dirty garden hose. So I asked a friend to pay the foundation on my behalf : http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=23-06-2015#1173438

This was done plainly, publicly, on the Bitcoin irc channel (also on Freenode). And yes, chief among the benefits of Bitcoin is that I can do this : I can send payments from anywhere to anywhere, and any aspiring “government” can shove their aspirations. (The other chief benefit being that lo! BuySellAds takes Bitcoin, which is why there’s an ad for Eulora, MiniGame’s Bitcoin-based MMORPG right here on this forum!)

The result ?

Hi,
I mail with someone calling self Riccardo, claiming to own websites from Mircea Popescu, and paying me via a South African PayPal account that doesn’t show a website.
I’m sorry, but I don’t want to get involved with this. I will refund the donation.
-Ton-

Now, to be clear : I don’t begrudge the man the right to refuse help, from anyone, for any reason (Ricky does, but that’s another story). Heck, if he feels like taking it to the extreme he can even outright decide to refuse help from anyone, and finance the whole kaboodle out of his own pocket - I know I do exactly that, for plenty of things.

Nevertheless, a few things have to be pointed out :

  1. Merchandising is a very 80s (that is to say, atechnical, demeaning and very, very wasteful) method to support anything. I don’t want to force the irrigation of another acre of South American forrest so the cotton can be grown so the shirt can be made so I can spend ten dollars, throw away ten and support you for forty-five cents if you get even that much. There’s no need for further keychains and coffee mugs in the world. For that matter, I don’t wear tshirts, I don’t carry keychains and I the very little coffee I actually drink comes out of actual porcelain.

  2. PayPal is a very stupid way to do payments online in 2015. Yes, I get it, last you felt like expending any thought on the topic was 1995, and hey, they were a hip new thing then. Sure, they were, back then. Meanwhile it sold out, to be merged with Hot Topic to create the USG MiniTruth. Stop using fucking PayPal, there are much better alternatives. It’s been 20 years, after all. Time to get with the times ?

  3. A poor reaction to strange is the best predictor of low intelligence. Everything worth doing, everything important, everything you will enjoy, and remember, and be in the end ready to die for will come to you as a surprise originally. This is a given. There are two kinds of people in the world, the sort that react with curiosity to surprise, and the sort that start flailing their arms, stuffing their ears and yelling. The thing is that we have a name for each kind. The name for the first is creative, and the name for the other set is whatever you wish to call them.

So on that note : I tried to support this thing, and didn’t manage to. I’m sure you don’t need it, but even without needing it - consider what you can do for the other people that in the future might want to support this thing, so they actually manage. And no, it’s not just about money, by the time this sort of discord shows up in the bottom line, it’s been going on in the creative spheres far, far longer, and probably poisoned them thoroughly.

Yet, none of this is actually my problem. So… cheers!

2

In the spirit of that same honesty and transparency referenced in the original post, I will recount the unhappy story of my trying to support Blender.

It started on irc (as you may or may not know, Blender has a #blender channel on Freenone ; as you also may or may not know, there’s a lot more to the world than the web, and most important people doing important things can not be found on any webforum) :

Jun 23 07:34:51 <mircea_popescu> JA12 incidentally, what’s the best way to support the blender foundation ?
<JA12> mircea_popescu: buy blender related products and services, some of that money finds its way back to blender development fund. direct donation is also an option if you prefer
<mircea_popescu> didn’t see anything on the website
<mircea_popescu> i’m not too keen on this entire merchandising front
<JA12> mircea_popescu: blendercloud is one service/product directly related to foundation but partners also sponsor it
<JA12> mircea_popescu: it, as in blender development
<JA12> https://www.blender.org/foundation/development-fund/
<bigstu80> mircea_popescu I just paypal to the dev fund on a monthly basis as JA12 said

The most important thing you must understand about PayPal is that using it is worse than wearing baby otter fur while kicking around footballs made by five year old concentration camp prisoners hanging a foot above ground from steel meathools stuck in their eye sockets.

Yes, it is really that bad. PayPal is the enemy, declared and avowed, of everything that is good and right with the world, and especially ~ ESPECIALLY ~ any sort of creativity of any kind whatsoever. I won’t rehash their outrageous history of rape and pillage directed against the human spirit, suffice it to say I won’t ever use it, and the notion of anyone ~ ANYONE ~ involved in a creative endeavour of any kind, to any degree, using them is, again, beyond scandalous. Stop promoting your sworn enemies, yo!

That said, I am not a fanatic, and I understand that sometimes you have to drink water out of a dirty garden hose. So I asked a friend to pay the foundation on my behalf : http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=23-06-2015#1173438

This was done plainly, publicly, on the Bitcoin irc channel (also on Freenode). And yes, chief among the benefits of Bitcoin is that I can do this : I can send payments from anywhere to anywhere, and any aspiring “government” can shove their aspirations. (The other chief benefit being that lo! BuySellAds takes Bitcoin, which is why there’s an ad for Eulora, MiniGame’s Bitcoin-based MMORPG right here on this forum!)

The result ?

Hi,
I mail with someone calling self Riccardo, claiming to own websites from Mircea Popescu, and paying me via a South African PayPal account that doesn’t show a website.
I’m sorry, but I don’t want to get involved with this. I will refund the donation.
-Ton-

Now, to be clear : I don’t begrudge the man the right to refuse help, from anyone, for any reason (Ricky does, but that’s another story). Heck, if he feels like taking it to the extreme he can even outright decide to refuse help from anyone, and finance the whole kaboodle out of his own pocket - I know I do exactly that, for plenty of things.

Nevertheless, a few things have to be pointed out :

  1. Merchandising is a very 80s (that is to say, atechnical, demeaning and very, very wasteful) method to support anything. I don’t want to force the irrigation of another acre of South American forrest so the cotton can be grown so the shirt can be made so I can spend ten dollars, throw away ten and support you for forty-five cents if you get even that much. There’s no need for further keychains and coffee mugs in the world. For that matter, I don’t wear tshirts, I don’t carry keychains and I the very little coffee I actually drink comes out of actual porcelain.

  2. PayPal is a very stupid way to do payments online in 2015. Yes, I get it, last you felt like expending any thought on the topic was 1995, and hey, they were a hip new thing then. Sure, they were, back then. Meanwhile it sold out, to be merged with Hot Topic to create the USG MiniTruth. Stop using fucking PayPal, there are much better alternatives. It’s been 20 years, after all. Time to get with the times ?

  3. A poor reaction to strange is the best predictor of low intelligence. Everything worth doing, everything important, everything you will enjoy, and remember, and be in the end ready to die for will come to you as a surprise originally. This is a given. There are two kinds of people in the world, the sort that react with curiosity to surprise, and the sort that start flailing their arms, stuffing their ears and yelling. The thing is that we have a name for each kind. The name for the first is creative, and the name for the other set is whatever you wish to call them.

So on that note : I tried to support this thing, and didn’t manage to. I’m sure you don’t need it, but even without needing it - consider what you can do for the other people that in the future might want to support this thing, so they actually manage. And no, it’s not just about money, by the time this sort of discord shows up in the bottom line, it’s been going on in the creative spheres far, far longer, and probably poisoned them thoroughly.

Yet, none of this is actually my problem. So… cheers!

3

MirceaPopescu,

I can imagine your frustration, what a hassle. I doubt that this forum can help with it, though, we are all mainly just Blender users. Maybe you could email Ton directly and work something out. I’m sure he will listen to your concerns, he is a pretty approachable guy.

You could also catch him in #blendercoders on freenode, the developers channel, and have a direct chat about it.

I assume you have seen this page, but in case you have not, here’s the donation & payment page on blender.org, with some alternatives to PayPal.

4

What a load of utter nonsense. Do you have any idea how much fraud is going on over the internet? Literally 100% of “surprises” I get contacted about online are scams.

It’s nice that you wanted to donate, but you can’t expect people to invest their time into doing a background check for such a convoluted multi-national money transfer scheme you made up there. As you said, PayPal are not “a nice company”, they can freeze your account if they suspect fraud of any kind.

Also be aware that you can donate via Bitcoin. For the dev fund, PayPal is used because it is widely-used and offers a convenient way to provide subscriptions. You can complain about PayPal all you want, but users have adopted it and to them it is a good service. Bitcoin is still a very inconvenient way to pay online, and very few customers will use it.

5

@Shane - I’m not terribly invested or anything, it’s just that I happened to run across the thread. I’m sure the guy’s fine, approachable and everything else, and I don’t personally expect any sort of anything come out of this. So yeah, we’re all Blender users (I’m really the manager of a Blender users outfit, if you will, so a Blender user twice removed I guess) just doing a little bit of gossip is all.

@BeerBaron - I don’t expect people to anything, mind. What do people expect me to ? Start there, that’s the point. Me not expecting others to anything is one thing, others expecting me to whole pile of whatever “because the Internet” is another thing.

In any case, that “literally 100%” seems to have just self-defeated itself, has it ? Which was mostly the point of my original post.

6

Disclaimer: The following is not an official statement about what happened with MirceaPopescu’s donation, and represents just what I saw of the discussion leading up to a donation being refunded a few days ago. This may or may not be the same donation; that said, there are sufficiently many similarities between the two to believe that they are the same case.

IIRC, on Tuesday morning GMT (Tuesday evening local time), Ton asked for help in verifying the safety (i.e. whether it was a dodgy/rouge site that was spam, pushed malware, or was engaged in legally questionable practices) of a link that a donator had asked to have included on the blender.org pages. As a bit of history, we’ve had a few previous instances of blatant blackhat-SEO hijinks where some company/site with no need/use/connection for Blender (IIRC, they stated as much in their requests) have sent donations and asked to have their sites listed on blender.org’s donations list, in a bid to bump up their own search engine rankings by being associated with “reputable” sites.

From the discussions which followed, several people raised concerns about the site. IIRC, these included concern about the complex chain of multinational links involved (i.e. a Romanian (?) address with a server in another country, other contact info in a third country), confusion/concern about what the site was about (e.g. whether it was promoting a game that also secretly worked away in the background to mine bitcoins), and having a paywall that comes up after 1-2 articles.

Taken together, there were too many signs pointing to potentially shady/suspicious things going on, hence the donation being refunded (better safe than sorry).

Anyways, that was my impression of the situation. Again, this is not an official statement/explanation of what happened here.

(Re PayPal: Yes, I have some reservations about it myself, but not as much as I have about Bitcoins. Then again, I’m also someone who doesn’t trust/use online banking at all, so that may not count for much :wink:

7

What’s wrong with Paypal ? In a nutshell ?

8

@MirceaPopescu

Why didn’t you donate with Bitcoins directly? The address is right there on the donation page. Here’s the blockchain.info page:

https://blockchain.info/address/17orEh51ab8HoU7g8Ezwcp76jCpeL7PabJ

9

Although he did indeed say “literally”, I think it’s fairly obvious from context that he doesn’t actually mean “literally 100%”. Taken as intended, his point is a very good one: there is an enormous amount of fraud online, and if something looks suspicious (especially if it involves money) the wise course of action is to give it a wide berth. The foolish course of action is to say, “There’s a chance this might be legit, and I’m afraid of missing out, so I’m going to go for it!”–that is exactly the attitude that fraudsters are counting on.

Even reading your own description in your post above of how you made the donation, I was thinking “that sounds very abnormal and convoluted, I totally understand why Ton was suspicious of it”.

As pointed out by others already (but apparently it bears repeating), you can make direct BitCoin donations to the Blender Foundation, no PayPal involved.

10

I’ve been using Paypal for years but started to suspect they’re charging fees or something like “penalties” for doing transactions on weekdays or holidays (banks are close). I’m not sure, I really haven’t explored it further, but something like that is scary, especially when you’re using your bank account, however small the money is in it.

People need to be careful in using Paypal. I’ll be looking for alternatives. Let’s hope this entity will go out of business.

11

I really want to know what wrong with Paypal?

12

Sorry for sounding stupid but,
what’s wrong with paypal?
I have never used it but the way I think it works is that you pay money on something, money goes to the other person.

Don’t take this the wrong way by the way,
I really want to know, I’ve heard many people say paypal is bad but they never really say why…

13

@blendDoodler it makes sense that they take some kind of fee so they don’t go out of business does it not ?

14

I really want to know what wrong with Paypal?

Well, there are rules for banks and bank transfers. Paypal does not follow them really.

Privacy: They give away your email adress, and you might get spam. Proven by a german newspaper man. Now what is with the other data sets …
Reliability: You can never say how long such a transfer will take. They can stop a transfer at any point when they are in the mood to do so. Without reason, without explanation. Without a chance to get your money back. Arbitrary.
Law: They have several clauses in their eula that breaks german and european law. Paypal gots sued because of this in germany.

All in all Paypal is something that i personally avoid where ever possible.

15

Short story - its not a bank. So it doesn’t follow banking regulations. This lead of a lot of negatives and problems in its history.

Of course, over the years it changed hands and improved.

But it still doesn’t change the fact that its NOT a bank.

16

Good to know, i have never had problem with it but now i m warned.

17

If you give the money to me, I’ll give it to the Blender Foundation :yes:

18

It is about time that the Blender Foundation gets itself a decent payment gateway.

19

For EU citizens there’s bank transfer, easy, cheap and reliable, best option. Others will have to use PayPal or Bitcoin. What else would you propose?

20

A Decent Payment Gateway working with big credit and debit card systems without using Paypal intermediate gateway, something any serious online business would have.