New Blender Foundation Transparency Blog

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
41

Possibly so (got BeerBaron blocked so only saw that post when you quoted it)… but the point of this thread is increasing transparency. Derailing this thread with that argument, no matter how valid it might be, isn’t going to help it or the proposal suggested at all. I would like to see m9105826’s idea given a chance to succeed rather than derailed into oblivion.

At the very least, additional transparency gives the community more information with which to carry on the other arguments if they’re still warranted. :wink:

42

Transparency is always good, just keep it coming. Some projects that are supposed to be monthly loose their momentum after a while.

43

I don’t care about money related issues because I think that’s the foundation’s business and it should be handled internally.

However I think this is an important point:

I’d really love to know why some of the compositor patches (e.g. 3D LUT Node) are rejected. The code is out there already but it is not included. Are these patches just poorly written or don’t they fit into the foundation’s vision of the compositor?

44

For the most part, if a patch is explicitly rejected, the reasons are typically included right in the patch tracker. What else beyond that would you be interested in knowing?

45

Rejected was probably the wrong word.

I’m not sure if it got rejected, but it’s a ready made patch which has been on the compositor’s proposal page forever: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Proposals/Compositor

It’s out there and it’s working. Why hasn’t it been included? Is it poorly written?

46

I generally agree with that except for organizations, Like the BF, that ask for donations. The people who “don’t care” about such matters will not be harmed by the release of financial statements that they do not read, but those who do care of such things will get the information they require to judge an organization worthy of donation.

I’m absolutely not specifically suspicious of the BF in any way, not do I care that some money goes to areas I’m not interested in. I just think all donation-receiving entities should be transparent on how their money is used. For me this is a moral requirement when companies ask for charity.

That said, I am bound to be a little generally suspicious when the head of an organization promises to publish financials but then fails to do so for 10 years.

47

Has the patch been submitted to the tracker?

48

Is this transparency only for the funds or the user voice as well?

49

@m9105826 I think this is a great idea!

And, since there will be a lot of people asking for stuff and demanding to have what they want as quick as they want it, I think that there should be also regular polls asking people to vote on what targets should be addressed first. That way, the BF stills decides what is going to be included on each release but it also gives the people the opportunity to have a voice on when those features are going to be included and why.

50

In the opening post, there is no mention of financial transparency whatsoever, it talks about transparency in regards to development.

If you’re publishing highly detailed financial statements (as some people here suggest), you’re indirectly publishing the income of the individuals the BF employs, which is clearly a privacy concern.

When you offer people “more transparency” they will gladly take it, even if it is of no utility to them - but it doesn’t come for free, does it? From my point of view, this all sounds like busywork for developers. Maybe the first “transparency report” should also contain an analysis of the opportunity cost that went into it.

If indeed you want to “quell the discontent”, I’ll reiterate (at the risk of of being off-topic): Come up with a participatory mechanism, instead of more means for justifying what you would already have done anyway.

51

I have to disagree here. A participatory mechanism (one that could override developers) would mean ignorant people could and would participate. That’s not generally a good idea. They mustn’t under any circumstance need explanations why their ideas are horrible, if only to leave the devs with some semblance of sanity.

That’s not to say the blog, or too much transparency in general, is a good idea either. If I was Ton I wouldn’t touch this with a 10-foot pole.

52

I have read statements recently saying that “developers don’t care about users”. For FOSS, this is so wrong in my experience (and my personal motivation). So it would be great if this blog could counter that perception. The usual feeling is “my priority feature is not being worked / included” so therefore devs don’t care about users (i.e., “me”). Yet every developer is working on something that matters to users, be it bug fixing or some feature that some users clearly want. So positive stories of these things happening might help counter the “developers don’t care about users” myth.

53

That’s precisely why I believe that the blog should be just to inform, and to allow the users to vote on what the BF already decided is going to be included (specially features that are more “visual” in nature). Isn’t that somewhat similar to what Autodesk did to decide what features were added to the latest version of their software? I honestly don’t think that a full redesign of Maya’s interface and icons was something decided by the AD developers, that must’ve been voted by the community.

When I think on a participatory mechanism I don’t think overriding the developers is a good idea. But, giving the community the opportunity to vote on what gets done first could be a good way to keep the BF informed on what the users need and use the most, while keeping control on the features that get added to Blender.

Am I being too optimistic here? :stuck_out_tongue:

54

Part of me also thinks that the transparency should be limited to those who donate… we don’t need a bunch of people who don’t donate a cent complaining about where money is going and how it should be spent…

55

This would be a mechanism where people set priorities from a spectrum of possible and realistic directions that the developers themselves would define. I would wager that even if many users are ignorant towards technical details, they nevertheless know much better what they actually need for their work than the developers do.

Overriding a decision or a veto should be reserved the extreme cases where, in the face of viable alternatives, the decision of developers goes against the demands of the users.

Right now, decisions already have to be made in terms of priorities, but realistically you can only influence this process as a user through a lot of social engineering. That to me is the actual basis for discontent. If anybody was sincerely interested in the development process, they could already follow it to great detail.

Having said all that, I don’t think this is a path that needs to be taken. However, if you’re trying to get people to finance development of your already free software, it’s in your best interest to offer them some incentive - participation could be that.

56

I’d happily take you up on that wager if there was some kind of objective test. In my experience most peoples’ imaginations are limited to slight variations on what they’ve already seen before. They don’t really know what they need until they see it implemented in one package or another. At best, they know what they want.

57

A lucid and deliciously compact explanation of what is wrong (unfixably wrong) with Blender development.

Now I hope that the people who still insisted in having unfounded hopes decide once for all to ditch them.

58

Perhaps what might work better than a community vote system, is to have a vote system accessible by a board of very experienced and trusted artists who are actively pushing Blender in their work.

This would have the benefit of creating higher quality opinions and ensure that only the most useful and functional proposals make it in via an overriding decision (not to mention that other feature proposals will likely get into place because it’s something that is needed and not just because it sounds cool).

Now I know that some people might hate the idea because it assumes exclusivity, but it’s better than having the devs. make decisions on 5 page threads that go nowhere.

59

I share your sentiment and I really appreciate what is being done, but I’m afraid it doesn’t matter to many (vocal) users here. The thought of more transparency is fine, but the fact is that Blender development is already very transparent, it is just scattered all over the place (code blog, the gooseberry weeklies, d.b.o, plasma solutions videos, IRC, live feature branches, etc. etc.). That is not the problem as I see it.

In my perspective there has been a change in atmosphere and attitude in this community going back at least a year, where the individual users expectations and entitlement is at an all time high. I don’t think many of those who are most vocal about their disappointment understands how open source development works, especially the free/libre kind. Yes you can get paid to work on FLOSS, that doesn’t mean you must therefore cater to every users personal needs and wants. Donating towards something doesn’t buy you influence. Even Epic Games can’t demand that their $10.000 donation has to exclusively be used on implementing a proprietary format, or Steam workshop donations has to be spend on game relevant development. We all have our field of interest/work, but it is simply unrealistic to expect that development should satisfy our personal needs, when Blender as a project is still primarily made by volunteers (if money were a driving factor for those hired by the BF/BI, I doubt they’d still be doing it).

It saddens me when I see comments like “Tsk, PTEX delayed yet again?! The development model is broken. UDIM is better anyways, work on that!” or “Autodesk listens to users better than Blender developers!”. Many big features in Blender are done by one person, typically after they are done with their day job or maybe for part-time pay, not by some well compensated senior programmer (team) working full time for a specialized company or in-house R&D. I don’t get why some complain that they don’t have money for commercial software, and then complain about Blender not being up to par with “the industry standards”. If you are starving and can’t wait for the crop to grow, go buy some food! If not, be patient and thankful for what others are giving you.

Sorry for the rant, I just fear that despite the best intentions doing this transparency blog, it will end up creating a more toxic environment here, especially when financials are involved (“What?! Ton spend money on movie tickets for the team? They should be working for my money!”).

You mean like the Gooseberry artists? Or do you want the community to vote on who should be on this experienced and trusted pool, so they can vote on features that will satisfy everyone? :rolleyes:

60

I’m thinking the mods have forsaken this thread. Participatory polls, voting, and other means of us telling developers what to do is not transparency - that is control. Transparency might aid that goal elsewhere, but the goal of the blog was (and I quote) “honesty and transparency” in order to “reach out to the community more effectively, especially for those who donate and are unsure what they’re donating towards”.

With this in mind, getting questions we want answered from the Blender Foundation is what the thread is about. Not increasing community participation in the decision process, not controlling the Blender Foundation’s actions, and not replacing Ton’s veto with a some democratic process amongst the community. Regardless of how you feel about those things - m9105826 isn’t going to be making his blog about that. So the ranting, complaining, and gnashing of teeth is simply distracting & derailing the good that can come from his efforts.

With this in mind, can we please, for the love of Mork & Mindy, please stick to the questions we can pose to the Blender Foundation? At the very least, see if you can support for questions that will reveal information supporting your case for community control rather than have m9105826 see us as a lost cause.