Sense of entitlement. It’s like giving shelter and free food to a free rider. Before long he’ll feel he’s entitled to it. He’ll even complain about the food. Moral lesson of the story is don’t take any money from him. Get other source of funding that trust you and allows you to go where you want to go.
I tip my hat for the man that started blender but the moment nan went bankrupt he doesn’t own it anymore, the moment he release it as opensource he doesn’t own it anymore it belong to the mass public, the volunteers, donor and sponsorship and to the users…
he just a part of blender
you said he doesn’t control blender but you also said ton controls blender foundation… well blender foundation is blender, the one that spearheaded its development and activities.
btw many righteous man have lost their way as time goes by, many visionaries had been blinded and clouded as time goes by.
Sense of entitlement. It’s like giving shelter and free food to a free rider. Before long he’ll feel he’s entitled to it. He’ll even complain about the food. Moral lesson of the story is don’t take any money from him. Get other source of funding that trust you and allows you to go where you want to go.
or … give me money to buy food so that I can cook it for you and we can share it… the moment the food was serve you only gave him a minimal meal. Sense of entitlement kick in… you start to complain I buy the food and cook it I should have a greater share.
moral lesson never beg for something or money and never complain when you volunteer for a work. never take or involved others when
you want to travel you will spent discussing which direction the two of you will take from left to right from up and down.
Was there some frat boy challenge I’m unaware of to see how often one can cause an argument using the phrase “sense of entitlement”? It’s getting old and it’s not relevant to the two main subjects of this thread - how much power does Ton have over Blender & how much power does Ton acknowledge he has over Blender.
Simply put, no-one here is arguing that Ton shouldn’t be in charge of the Blender Foundation, the developers they hire (or grant money to), or the overall direction of Blender. Ton is the guy who’s been working on it since the beginning, he puts in the effort to get government grant money for the Open Films, he’s the man organisations talk to when money for Blender (in general) is going to be donated, and he’s the one that setup & heads the Blender Foundation (getting to choose which developers are hired & which projects to apply grants to).
There is no argument about this or a movement to replace the guy. “Entitlement” has nothing to do with the subject. Can we at least confine that trolling to threads in which it is at least tangentially connected please?
Everyone knows that they are free to fork Blender at any tim and do as one wants?
This comment is often seen in context of open source, but it’s not an argument actually. We artists often don’t want to become programmers and often it’s not even realistic, but we do want developers to somehow improve the program. I guess Blender isn’t that bad after all, maybe it just seems that way, because everyone has their own opinion about how to improve it. Then again, open source developers can be inflexible to suggestions and do whatever they find is a better way. That’s why things like that clumsy 3D cursor has survived this far.
And as one of the Blender developers has already stated in this thread, no fork of Blender is going to work unless it takes with it a significant number of other developers. Ton leads the Blender Foundation which directly hires some of those developers, arranges for (or gives) grants to others, and owns the Blender trademarks.
Yes, people can fork Blender. They’d have to call it something else, use a different trademark, and invoke a schism in both the development & used community in order to be successful. Contrary to the impression a strong debate might create in others, most developers are not interested in taking the community and splitting it in half.
I guess Blender isn’t that bad after all, maybe it just seems that way, because everyone has their own opinion about how to improve it.
Blender is the most comfortable program for 3D I ever used.
Doesn’t mean it’s perfect.
Forks dont really have to be such a big deal, EdgeBSD forked from NetBSD because they want to be more bleeding edge & agile, GCC/EGCS fork is also interesting (which eventually merged back into GCC).
Its not that some big argument has to happen for a fork, just there needs to be a REALLY GOOD reason (which can include disagreements between team members, but not necessarily).
Basically, if Ton went mad tomorrow and started making many decisions which are totally unacceptable to existing devs, we would probably fork (and form another foundation, find sources of funding etc). But this is a hypothetical, Ton has no signs of going mad 
Wow. Not really. Blender Foundation is to Blender what Cannonical is to Linux. Open Source means the source is open. That’s about it. Cannonical doesnt own Linux and isnt itself Linux. They develop Ubuntu, a “flavor” of Linux. Open Source means you can yourself take that source code, spearhead your own branch and make your own organization to develop and maintain that branch. That’s it. Blender Foundation’s active involvement and communication with the community of it’s users isn’t “owed” in any sense, it’s a culture that has to be maintained by both sides, like a friendship. It’s Ton’s vision of openness and it’s pretty cool if you ask me.
As for donations, i cant off the top of my head think of any project or charity that lets it’s donators micro-manage every penny of their personnal donation. If you support a project on kickstarter, you dont automatically get a vote. You dont support a game and then call them up and say “Hey my 5$ is specifically to make that alien guy blue”. They present their project and vision and you either buy into or you dont.
With all the entitled complaining on this forum, I sometimes really wish some of you guys would just branch off and do your own thing. Make your own foundation, raise your own funds, implement your andrew price GUI and see where it takes you.
At least not more than he’s always been 
All developers are inflexible to suggestion, not just the open source ones. In fact, all engineer are, whether software, electronics, hardware or clean room. Or at least, that is how they appear to the user. I can tell you this, having experience with all of these. In reality, they are very much open to suggestion, when such suggestions are formulated in the proper way. A lot of suggestions, like the gui proposals by Andrew et al., are not as well defined as the person making the proposal thinks they are. At work, our electronics technician always says that he tries to make whatever part he thinks the phd students will need, because what they are asking for almost certainly won’t do the job. This is because physicists are bad at describing an electronics problems as they have no experience. Similarly, blender artists are bad at giving suggestions that are defined well enough to be implemented.
Extremely broad assumption. Thats like saying all mexicans eat tacos for breakfast lunch and dinner, or that all computer nerds are anti-social. Its nothing more than a self prescribed stereotype that cant be taken seriously.
Some developers are flexible, some rely on suggestion, some do not. There is a prevalent culture within open sourced software, that many have noticed… and that is merely the pattern being described. I could argue much of it stems from the desire to be different as opposed to conventional.
Similarly, blender artists are bad at giving suggestions that are defined well enough to be implemented.
Disagree, many have given good suggestions and not just with suggestions but with proposals and additional documentation as well. A lot of it gets written off with the “we are not maya” or “our way is better” or “thats not important”. Some even scoffed at the idea of actually making the UI controls consistent across Blender… what a crazy concept right? Consistency…
Actually with Blender.Developer.Org, I think its more open to suggestion than it has ever been, but its still not even close to being there…especially now that the pet projects are in full swing again (see Gooseberry).
@Sainthaven: as I said, that is how they appear to the user. Until you take the time to learn how they need the problem to be defined.
The Gooseberry FAQ apparently states that the cloud money might be used for general Blender development projects or for a new short movie if the funding fails to meet the target (which is what’s likely going to happen now).
So the worldwide collaboration (and some of the development catering to that), may end up being shelved as of now, though it probably doesn’t mean it won’t happen in the future.
Folks, remember this: it takes money to do open-source projects on the caliber of and at the level of Blender. And that requires a Foundation, and t-h-a-t requires “executive leadership that is adroid at herding cats.” :yes:
People who furnish money to Foundations, in order to further what they consider to be a worthy aim, do not do so without a careful assessment of what leadership is in place. They must have objective reasons to have (and, to maintain) confidence that the organization that they are backing is organized and that it is achieving its aims – with full financial and project/process accountability.
A hallmark of a really excellent leader is that the people sincerely believe that “we (the team …) did all this,” and maybe even also that the leader didn’t do anything. But, what the leader did do was to create and to maintain the environment within which team success was made possible. Ton is not the only leader within the Blender project, and he might not especially want to be singled-out. But, you have excellent leadership at Blender Foundation, and Blender would not be this fantastic thing that we all enjoy, nor would it have advanced as rapidly and as surely as it has, without it.
The other prerequisite for a fork is that you need to have Devs on both sides of the divide. Having a hypothetical situation were a group of users disagree with the Devs and the rest of the users wont result in a fork, just angry forum posts. 
Nope, sometimes forks take practically all the devs.
Theres also some things you can do with licensing - see how LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice but changes can only go one way (OpenOffice can’t take changes from LibreOffice without going to GPL which would be against IBM’s business model).
Someone could fork Blender, make all the extra contributions AGPL, then BlenderFoundation couldn’t accept the changes without also moving to AGPL.
This way its possible to make a better version of Blender then the BlenderFoundation can while staying open-source and GPL compatible.
But these are tricks with licensing incompatibilities, for Blender its not really going to be a successful move to try to try such things.
Where users disagree with devs the result could be a Blender distribution (like Linux Distros … which can be a good thing), where they largely keep the same codebase but make changes based on differences of opinions (different defaults, accept some existing patches which the BF wouldnt). It wouldn’t surprise me if this happens at some point. You could even say the FluidDesigner project is baking a kind of Blender-Distro.
Note: AGPL is a great license, and we may even move to it one day, but doing so to intentionally become incompatible with the work of the BlenderFoundation may be doing the right things for the wrong reasons, so to say.
Well, the GCC/EGCS fork is interesting precisely because it was a bit of a big deal. They forked precisely because they thought (& were right at the time) that the goals/needs of FSF in developing GCC were at odds with that of a good many people in the community. Go read the mailing archives prior to the split - it was getting pretty ugly. It was either fork or lose a huge number of developers.
The reason for the eventual remerge was basically the fact that the majority of the community went over to the EGCS. Basically, FSF’s version died a stagnant death and EGCS replaced it. The effects of this are still felt today and there is no little acrimony amongst the older players.
No-one really wants that with Blender and so the suggestion developers can just fork it, therefore Ton’s power is minimal, doesn’t pass muster in the real world.
@BTolputt, your right, but from the users perspective things worked out ok - theres still one ‘gcc’ compiler which gets all the features/fixes.
@ideasman42
I think if it ever got to the point were their were multiple active and competing distros of Blender it would be when/if Blender became the major 3D package and each major studio was maintaining there own build.
I know Ton has mentioned 123D and a possible “Blender for beginners”, would an EZBlender be created as a blender distro or would it be a setting in the preferences?
Sorry, I know you don’t know the future. What I meant is what approach would be best from a developers point of view?