I cannot neither deny nor share your predictions for the future, but I agree that blender has changed; with the advent of the Cloud and the encouraging and incentivizing to paid addons (which also were possible even before), the old route is diverted.
paolo
A donation is a choice. One is not expected to receive something back, except maybe a warm feeling of satisfaction for having helped a cause. You don’t buy influence with donations, and it gives no right to entitlement. (I don’t mean the perverse misuse of the word “donation” in politics, where the intend is in fact to buy influence. A donation should be a selfless act meant to help others).
All charities are trying to convince people to donate, and it is your choice which ones aligns with your ideals the most. If you feel burned don’t donate again, but don’t hold a grudge since it was your choice to begin with. It makes no sense to continually donate towards something you don’t agree with.
Come on, now. There is no point in getting upset and taking this personally. Take a minute to see that BA is a community site, and flare-ups like this only serve to make it a less-pleasant place to visit. If you feel you’re not getting on with another member then just don’t reply to them at all.
There are always thought police officers in every forum who love to curtail speech and human emotions. They love to treat people as if they are their children. I have no idea why.
If I can’t contribute anything to a thread or topic, I just stay away from it. It’s not my job to control what people feel.
None of which addresses the point I made regarding human nature and getting them to do something they currently do not.
Right. You ask about my contributions, I provide them, you flip out because it undermines the argument you were trying to use to make my points irrelevant.
You, clearly & without doubt, went personal with that post and so I’d love it if you ignore me from now on. Given the vitriol levelled by you here & elsewhere, I’m not holding my breath.
Now i know about green greed. :yes:
I think realistic price would be 100-300€, because Blender is such an ascetic software (at least now, who knows if it will change some day).
There’s some confusion here with blender itself and plugins offered by third parties through other distributors. An important distinction here, blendermarket is not the same as blender foundation, in fact it is a separate business. Maybe using “blender” in the name is misleading?
As far as I know there is no interest to charge blender itself. How other people licence their code though is their own choice. It can be argued that allowing people to sell closed plugins for blender will stifle development in core blender. However I don’t think this is the case here since plugin coders would not be coding for open source anyway.
It might be worrying if commercial plugin authors lobbied and tried to actively stop functionality present in plugins to actually make it in core blender but I don’t think we can go there easily, there is also forking which would make that more difficult.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. 
As an advocate of being able to distribute closed-source plugins, I have to second this. Not only would it be an undesirable outcome for Blender, but I find the idea both distasteful and highly unethical.
However, I also agree it would be an unlikely outcome for two reasons. Firstly, whilst the Blender Foundation has proven amenable to increasing priority of some development based on donation, they don’t seem to respond in a similar fashion when pressure is applied to not do something they want to. Gooseberry failed to achieve any of the targets set and yet the project continues with the aim to make the same movie as before. In other words, I don’t think anything could be achieved by lobbying BF/Ton to do something they don’t want to do… especially given a fork would render such a decision irrelevant.
similat too modo price a bit less i think.
I gave friendly advice to someone who is obviously upset. Its being supportive, not controlling.
But whatever. Things are getting a bit hot around here lately…
Isnt this whole threat a non topic ?.
I mean look at the history of blender, Blender started as a commercial application.
That failed, however there was a very active group around it in those days allready, and so Ton continued it as an opensource app.
Blender became a tool of and from the community licensed under Apache, and it is a great success so far; look where we are now with blender as compared to a few years ago.
Sure money solves a lot of things, hiring coders for example, or hiring art directors for a movie etc, but its in its essence a community based application, its up to the community to improve it. In any direction; and Blender has a lot of directions :))
(and for that reason why isnt there a daily coders youtube for blender, just to get more people into that ?.. )
Because now we all “want” things, but… if you where teached, you might know how to do it yourself and share it
He’s not asking for advice. He’s not your relative. Even Dr Phil don’t give advice to people who don’t need it. What he feels is his own business. No one else’s.
Seems you’re the one who needs help. Like I’ve hinted in my previous post, I’d rather stay away from topics where I can’t contribute anything of substance. I’m not their parents to say they should stop. They’re not seven year old kids. Things may get out of hand, but that’s life. Self censorship will eventually take over.
People need to let people express their thoughts. People around need to back off and let them settle their differences. Otherwise, they will never be resolved and they will stay bottled up and explode like volcanoes when time comes.
This subject about donation is an important one. Donations are why Blender development stay afloat. Without it, development halts and you won’t even have a site like this.
I’m honestly dreading the day Blender goes commercial. I know…I know …IT-CAN’T-HAPPEN! Heard this many times before, but if Blender is worth anything capitalism will find a way to collect.
I believe the slippery slope will be ads…maybe some splash screen commercial each time you launch the software or some annoying commercial on top or bottom of the software as you use it. Another way is this … force you to sign up for the downloads, require some information…some log-in to get your …e-mail address, phone number etc …before your can get the software. For many in their 20’s today …and the face-book crowd…that’s no problem and they will regard this exchange as free.
If that happens, I would say a fork appears within a month that removes all of the ad and monetization code and brings it to back to being a truly free application.
That’s the thing about having the source freely available, even though I highly doubt that Ton is even going to touch the idea of ads with a barge pole.
Also, it would probably help cool things down if one can stay away from pretending to an expert on the psychology of someone else, most people might that annoying and can lead to flamewars and people being driven away from the forum.
Blender will always remain free and open to everyone because there are many ways they can collect funding without charging users for the software. Blender Foundation can collect enough funding through donations, training materials, movies, and maybe even asset store. We should have nothing to fear.
Whatever. Have a nice day…
Please people read the Apache license, blender is free owned by its community that is all of you.
So don’t worry, as the license cant be reverted. ( besides that this never has been a goal ).
For those who think but then other industries will never create paid things for blender…
Well its completely legal to do so, and they do, they can write render engines, importers / exporters etc but they then need to maintain it themselves as its theirs, unless they hand it over to blender for free.
If they would donate such code / math to blender, and it gets into the blender core, then its just sharing.
Like last opensub div went into blender. Some CG studios dont realy mind whatever software does the trick for them.
Apache really is a good license model.
Around 65% of all web servers on the world use it. ( its not ruled by commercial companies…)
by now, much less than Houdini Indie. For obvious reason. i know it’s not apple and oranges, but still.
also to note there is free 3d modeller but only for modelling and animation and targeted to Unity users - but forgot the name. Its the software from Japan.
so it is what it is.
ps - i know Blender can do a lot. but depending on what you want from it. this is one of the reason back then C4D were module based, you doesn’t have to pay for what you doesn’t use.
If you have to pay to get Blender, then most of its users will switch to Wings, Luxrender, POV ray, and other stand alone open source apps. K-3d might even be resurrected.