Autodesk unfortunatelly has a trademark copy right over the 123d name
http://www.123dapp.com/
@blurymind
Yea I know, it was Autodesks 123D that I was talking about. It was at the last blender conference Ton was talking about the number of schools/beginners learning 3D with Autodeskās 123D. He mentioned or hinted āI might have misinterpreted itā that a Blender version aimed at that area was possible or at least questioned why it wasnāt.
I suppose to keep things on topic this shows his power or lack of it. Ton may or may not want to explore this area, but without the backing of the rest of the developers he cant do it on his own unless he wants to do it himself.
That is a very weak argument. Ton mentioning he might want to do something like 123D but he hasnāt really committed anyone to it. He really does want to make a feature film though, and he has the developers onside for that project, up to & including putting together a completely new crowd-funding website & online infrastructure for that purposeā¦ he just doesnāt have the community with him (or with him enough) to succeed at raising the necessary funds.
If you want to explore whether or not Ton has power over the Blender Foundation, you need to examine Tonās priorities. Gooseberry is one and gets developer & foundation attention. A Blender 123D is a āmaybeā, so it āmightā get some attention when that priority item is on top 
@BTolputt
Its a very weak argument because it was not an argument.
butā¦
You cant say; because Ton wants to make a full length feature film and the rest of the developers are working towards that end that they are doing so because Ton has power. They could also want to make a full feature length film just as much as Ton and they are all doing what they want to do.
If Tons priorities were out of alignment with the rest of the developers Ton would have no power as far as I can tell. That was what I was saying with the 123D example.
Isnāt 123D and 123D Creature just Autodeskās idea of capturing the hobbyist market by throwing out a small freebie app (compared to their much pricier products)?
Since Blender is free to begin with, why make a 123D version of Blender if that is the case? Why have a small, dumb version for hobbyists when they can get a high quality piece of 3D software already?
@Ace Dragon
As far as I can see it 123D is used by autodesk to āgroomā kids and beginners into the Autodesk fold. 123D is used in schools and universities as a cheap and easy to use alternative to Maya/Max. Yes they could just use Blender but its not the point, most of the kids/beginners learning at this stage are not after pro tools they want an easy to use taste of what 3D is. and IMHO 123D does a better job of that than Blender.
Edit; just reread this Iām not trying to be harsh/mean, just sucky vocabulary
Yet weāll argue it anyway right? 
[SUB](Just a joke people)[/SUB]
You are right, by itself that is far from enough to conclude Ton has power over themā¦ however you did manage to ignore the fact that he does employ at least four of them (i.e. he IS their boss & their paycheque comes from him) and has dedicated the Blender Foundation resources to the project. That is power.
Iām not saying the man is a god when it comes to his powers over Blender, but it would be disingenuous to say that his position as head of the Blender Foundation (i.e. in charge of all donations that come into Blender, individual, sponsorship, grants, or through arrangements with Valve/Steam) is a powerless oneā¦ especially if he ALSO gets veto power over the code committed into the official Blender distribution
Absolutely, if he was completely out of alignment with the rest of the developers, heād have no power. If, however, they are partially in alignment with him and/or they simply donāt want to split the community by banding together & forking Blender in opposition to the current leader - then his power simply as the man that started power is evident.
As developers have already mentioned, they donāt always see eye-to-eye with Ton on everything, but none of them really want to fork the project. If you want to see how bad things can get before there is enough impetus to defy the current leader of an open-source project - you need only look at how bad it got in GCC before people forked the EGCS version.
Iām not saying itās anywhere near that stage (far from it), but to say Ton has no power just ignores the dynamics of open-source projects, his role as Blender Foundation head (& the capability to spend Blender donations that entails), and the demonstrated power he wields as a veto on the official code repository. Nothing wrong with him having that power, but it is undeniably power Ton has and uses.
Itās a bit like Apple installing garage band for free and offering logic at a significant cost.
spin you want to spin I wonāt argue with the blind I wont wrestle with the pig, cause he loves it he loves getting dirty.
as for project, I already posted itā¦ community has the power, check this out and watch and read it carefully
are you butt hurt that andrew price open your eyes because of the truthā¦believe me thereās more truth that will irritate you
but for now lets save that or you could open your eyes accept blender that it is not what you think of.
*** moderator edited last comment nonconstructive/off-topic/offensive (ideasman42) ***
I think that Dictators are not exactly what people think. Any politician however violent and cruel he needs one thing to be successful at least. Peopleās support. Generally people conveniently ignore that crucial fact. Making too many enemies can be only bad not just for your political future , but for your health too.
Any leader needs a great deal of support to keep going, support is his fuel that keeps him in the leadership chair.
Of course Ton is not a dictator, he is one of the most approachable people I have met online. He is really open to new ideas, though we had several disagreements, he is an experienced coder and he is 100% dedicated to the future of Blender.
He is also the person that made all this possible so , to use a recent reference he is like Noah that saved blender with his open source Ark from the big flood of commercial demise that many not so popular 3d apps have suffered (see Amapi, Truespace, Softimage and many many more ) 
So many of us who love blender we owe a big thank you to Ton , and of course to all developers that have contributed big or small to this.
Have never seen the word ādonationā where donors get something in return. You donāt donate with the thought that youāll get something in return. You donate because of compassion, generosity and trust. Thatās why Iām not a fan of this cloud funding, whatever you call it. Itās never a good thing to raise funds with the promise of giving something in return. Itās way too complicated. Youāll have to hire someone full time just to serve people who donated. It will entail tons of manhours. The bulk of the funding needs to come from other sources like rich people, universities, film foundations, etc. BF should never rely on users.
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.
This is a no brainer. Bmesh was started by a coder, then continued by another coder supported by donations, the bulk of the coding was eventually completed by the main devs. And we now have Bmesh, so stable that itās as if itās always been there. It spawned into numerous, useful addons, dynamic topo and many beneficial things. Point is, itās open source. Users are not meant to rely heavily on the main devs.
[ā¦]Bmesh was started by a coder, then continued by another coder supported by donations[ā¦]
This self-contradiction makes it difficult for me to understand your point.
Donation, support, investment, etc. Semantics. I just used the word ādonationā because thatās the word used on Blenderās website.
Why should it take money? Itās more traditional that open source and development as a hobby didnāt require any external money. Donations came much later, only in last ten (even less) years or so. Kickstarter has emphasized the āobviousā need for money to get anything done, but somehow I feel itās wrong. Itās much more like just being a commercial developer rather than anything else.
Somehow it doesnāt make sense to me that people on this forum would be so vocally against money being used to develop Blender, as if to say they would prefer that Ton left Blender in the dust and headed up another commercial project instead. This forum might then cease to exist, along with all the arguments about nothing - to me, this sounds like an episode of the Twilight Zone.
Artists here in the recent past have argued about this software attracting only hobbyists, crying for better features like the commercial apps, crying for the label of Professional Software ā¢, and then say that it should be developed in a democratic vacuum by hobbyists for no money. Canāt have your cake and eat it too. Good luck with that, it isnāt going to end well.
@Craig Jones - it does seem that a few curve balls have thrown in the discussion thread by a few members. Itās all part of the soup that makes the thread unfortunately. As with any project, with the absence of hindsight, there will always be resources allocated perhaps not to the best of efficient usage, but at the end of the day, we will get there.
@Krice - theres no shouldās about it, some opensource have paid devs, some not. Though Im not sure where your notion of ātraditional open-sourceā comes from
Some software is fine just to be maintained and the slower pace of development means it can be done in spare-time.
However with computer graphics the technology changes and if you want applications to change with it, then this takes someones dedicated time, which is harder to get if someones not being paidā¦
I donāt warnt to harsh on other projects, but you can look at other open-source graphics software developed in spare time (k3d, artofillusion, moonlight3d, wings3d).
These projects do releases and make nice updates, but at a much slower pace (AFAICS).
Just to run with this for a little bit.
Getting a web presence is easy because it doesnāt really take a lot of skill: if you really want to host youāve got Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla etc to take the heavy lifting out of it; if you just want to give it content thereās Tumblr, Flickr, Soundcloud, YouTube, Vimeo, whatever. You donāt have to be super-smart to be an adequate web developer like I am, but at the end of the day I still like getting paid for doing it. Itās a living.
Getting someone to write a renderer on the other handā¦ there arenāt that many rendering coders around, despite the relative abundance of rendering coders around here. Someone like that should be compensated not just for their time but for the application of their specialised field of knowledge - youāre more likely to retain them in your project, they can get their code written quicker with less distractions like where their next meal is coming from or doing overtime at their primary place of employment, etc. Theyāre absolutely worth the spend if the moneyās there, even when the fruits of their labours are offered free for anyone to use and examine.
This forum needs a ālikeā facility. Would have saved me a post by simply giving Campbellās post a thumbs upā¦ but if I am going to post, however, I may as well chip in a few words on top of the simple āYup, what he saidā 
Simply put, Blender is not a small, ājust couple of hours of code on the weekendā, type project. It wouldnāt matter whether it was commercial or open-source - the application is large, the bugs are hard to find/diagnose, and it is still under active development (rather than just maintenance). All of this takes a lot of time on the part of the developers.
So you have a choice, either the application stagnates due to a lack of developer resources (& I can point to many an open source project that has) or you can feed & clothe developers so they have the time to work on Blender. This isnāt a matter of open-source vs commercial - itās a matter of needing X hours of development effort to keep the project moving and that X hours being more than the skilled developers can just donate here & there.
To keep Blender from winding up on the scrap heap of projects (indie, commercial, and open source) that coulda been a contenda, you need to have constant, skilled, and focused development effort focused on it. If the developers are not being paid, where do you suggest we find one hundred & sixty experienced man-hours (four full-time developers as per the BF website)?
If you take a look at Github which is by far the biggest online repo for git projects which is what blender now is, you wont have to believe it, you will know it. Github works on forks and pull requests which is how git works in general.
However its blender friendliness with developers that have lead to people not forking blender and instead being part of blender trunk.
Take for example my addon Gyes ( http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/System/Gyes ) took me literally 5 minutes to get it included it in blenderās main trunk (contrib addons) and it was my first and only contribution. I was not super motivated to get it included because I knew people were not using it that much, but it was so easy to do so . I was even given access to contrib addons to make additional improvement to my addon without asking for permission to get the new version included each time.
There is no doubt in mind that Blender developers are very welcoming people.