Uncommercializing Blender Market Addons ( donate for Trunk inclusion)

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
21

That is true legally, but from what I’ve seen the maintainers have expressed support for the marketplace as it is and have no desire to hamstring it as the OP suggests. As you yourself point out, doing this would be a perfect way to make the marketplace developers decide not to continue supporting their addons.

In any case my point was specifically addressing the OP’s original suggestion, which was to create a fund with which to buy trunk merge permission (legally unnecessary though that permission would be). My bafflement is not with the idea that GPL addons could in principle be added to master, but rather with the idea that a bunch of people on this forum can set up a fund and collect donations and then shove that at these developers demanding that they give up their spot on the marketplace. If someone wants to offer money to these developers as a fair play sort of exchange for merging their addons to master, I think that’s something that needs to be taken up with those marketplace developers first, not the forum.

22

And therein lies the misconception, support for addons is a never ending job, not to mention feature improvements and expansions.

Your suggestion would either mean: pay them once to make a alpha version and they’ll never touch it again, or pay for the same addon again and again with every version release.
Continuous work should mean continuous pay. When you clocked in at work after you first week, that wasn’t your last and only paycheck for the rest of your stay, was it?

If you’re still working, you should still be paid, unless we all just hate receiving updates and maintenance.

23

That’s an exaggeration. I did acknowledge that there is an issue here. What’s wrong with putting addons back up for fundraising for a new version?

Don’t fool yourself into thinking that charging for individual copies solves this problem conclusively. If the cost of maintenance is higher than the perpetual income, you have to retire your product. It happens all the time for commercial software, and it’s not like the customers are asked for permission. To keep your product alive, you eventually will need to charge for updates, too. I don’t see why it should be any different for products on the Blendermarket.

24

Oh, sick tired of these discussion. If you do not want to pay do not pay, and that is it.
It is crucial for every addon to be maintained, and developers will have interest doing so only if they have something to motivate them. There are a lot addons that were great but failed to work after few Blender versions, and devs were like sorry but I do not have interest into supporting it anymore… And if you want it in production that will span over year or two, well honestly I would prefer to buy it just to be on safe side from maintenance point of view.

25

This discussion is getting to the point of self-parody. People are so opposed to the notion of paying for an addon that they are willing to come up with a convoluted scheme to pay for the ability to not pay for the addon. Jesus Christ, just pay for the damn addons if you want them. They barely cost anything at all and you’re supporting the developer.

26

Ideally, nothing. Realistically, I’m not confidant that it would work.

I understand that, you were the only complaining about ‘royalties’

Contours is a living example of what it takes to expand a product. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there is a problem when you rely on the donations, just hoping someone will drop a coin in your cup for a item they already have. Yes, Blender foundation relies on
donations, but the user base is massive enough to justify it.

27

^^^This.

Too many kids think they’ve been robbed of addons that (they think) would have existed for free and equally as professional and polished and production ready (:lol). Not many of them ‘get’ that the market place spawned these addons, it attracted developers to build something they otherwise never would’ve invested time into.

28

How does any of this relate to anything I actually said? I didn’t complain about royalties, at all.

You guys aren’t actually reading what people say, you just want to leave your “nothing comes for free, you gotta pay for work, derp derp”-remarks. Those are completely missing the point. Nobody has asked to get these addons without having the developers compensated.

Let me spell this out for you so you can understand: There could be MORE MONEY in fundraiser-style promotion than in selling addons perpetually. Just look at the sales numbers on the Blendermarket, they are quite poor, for the most part. If you believe that developers who sell less than one copy per day are going to keep putting significant work into their addons, you are delusional.

29

There’s nothing stopping anyone from running a fundraiser for building new add-ons right now. I don’t see how the market has anything to do with this? These are two different funding models and each developer is free to choose which method they wish to use. Or to not use.

However, I will disagree that the notion of donations bringing in more money. Is it possible? Absolutely. But no such fund raisers in the past has done so. For example, Texture Paint Image Layers is a HUGE feature that many, many, many people have been calling for. The fundraiser has been going for well over a year and to this date has only raised 1,200 euros (assuming the meter is up to date): http://ruesp83.com/image-layer/funding/

In comparison, MotionTool has been out for less than a month and was brought in approximately $5,000 USD (3953.51 euro).

Sure that’s only one example, but take a look at Contours, Polystrips, Gaffer, BakeTool, Asset Sketchers, and others. The Blender Market is only getting started. This month (October) we’ve see a full 3x increase in sales.

In my opinion it’s only scratched the surface so far in enabling developers to continue ongoing development and build more powerful tools.

30

You could put it on the Blendermarket as a feature. You have at least some traffic, people go there to browse stuff, etc. Also, you handle the payment and you convey a certain level of trust. Some shitty fundraiser post on someone’s blog doesn’t look that good.

However, I will disagree that the notion of donations bringing in more money. Is it possible? Absolutely. But no such fund raisers in the past has done so. For example, Texture Paint Image Layers is a HUGE feature that many, many, many people have been calling for. The fundraiser has been going for well over a year and to this date has only raised 1,200 euros (assuming the meter is up to date): http://ruesp83.com/image-layer/funding/

That guy didn’t really deliver on anything, as far as I can tell. There was never a product. The proposed funding model (which BSurfaces used, to an unknown amount of revenue) is different: The product is already out, but only paying customers get it delivered instantly. In the end, the product is “liberated” for everyone to use. The “liberators” can pat themselves on the back for essentially being charitable. It’s just another form of promotion and psychologically, it could be quite effective, especially on people that are “free software proponents”.

31

That’s true, we could. At this time we won’t, though, first and foremost because we’re spread quite thin and our development list is already larger than we can currently handle.

As mentioned above, unfortunately BSurfaces is no longer working. It hasn’t been maintained. I would be very curious to know what amount of funding it received, but we’ll just have to speculate.

Regarding Image Layers, sure it could be represented better, but it is a project to get image layers directly into Blender. There is no product. There is no add-on. Instead it is a direct feature development for Blender. Seems to me that should be even more appealing to people that want it since it would then come with every Blender version after being accepted, for everyone.

For the time being I’m just not convinced that the donation model actually works to create a sustainable development environment over time. The exception to this is donation subscriptions, such as the dev fund.

32

To refute one point - that the addons that come with Blender are low-quality.

I maintain some of these and think they work pretty well? :), at least I dont get bug reports about them any more… OBJ/BVH/FBX/3DS import/exporters (mont29 now mostly maintains FBX…) and 3D Print Toolbox.

I think these are reasonably stable scripts, yes they’re boring - but they are an example of addons that are well maintained in Blender (because they are supported by the Blender-Foundation I suppose…).

Just to say free doesn’t necessarily == low quality, just that one way or another, we need maintainers to hang around to check bug reports, make improvements and generally make sure the code is working well.

Also, WRT addons needing to be maintained/updated each release, IMHO it depends, a lot on which areas of the API’s the addons use. Some of the addons I maintain didnt need updates for quite a while (8+ releases… or more).

1 Like
33

Jonathan, just speaking hypothetically, would you be willing to implement a donation scheme through the marketplace if a sufficient number of developers with viable addons wanted to distribute those addons via such a scheme?

I ask this because I’m willing to bet that one major reason you haven’t decided to devote said thinly-spread web developer time to this task is that you have not received any notable amount of credible interest in having this feature in the first place. In which case the whole discussion of whether or not you should or could offer this funding model is kind of irrelevant anyway, right? People distribute on the marketplace because they want to sell their addons. If developers wanted to take BeerBaron’s advice and offer via a donate-then-release model, presumably they would express an interest in doing so. Until then…again, what are we even talking about here? Stuff is for sale on the blender marketplace, people. They are allowed to sell their software. Deal with it.

34

Penguinistas terror that somebody, somewhere, might be able to buy a loaf of bread by developing code.

35

I’m glad there is a market place for blender, Even if you do not use it personally. It lends value and validation to blender as a platform. And lets be real, Anything that is truly awesome in the market place will eventually be copied in some form in the free for all to use land.

And truthfully, I dislike theft. And taking someones hardwork from them with by force is theft.

36

I hope I didn’t give this impression, because I couldn’t agree more! Many of the add-ons that come with Blender and excellent and make a great impact on my daily workflow. Some examples include F2, 3D Print Toolbox. It’s more of an issue with very advanced and/or complicated add-ons, which tend to need more maintenance.

Sure, I’d be willing to consider it. I’d do it as a separate entity from the market. Any developer that has a viable add-on, and whom wishes to develop/distribute it this way please feel free to contact me.

Note: that isn’t to say that I can even do it, or would choose to, but I’m always willing to consider things.

37

Sure, to be clear that was my whole point. That funding method isn’t off the table. It’s just not what the developers on the marketplace want to do, so you have no particular reason to offer it at the moment.

Yet here’s this thread, essentially proposing to strongarm those developers into switching to that funding model, just because some people don’t like the idea of the marketplace.

People, please, for the love of Suzanne, just drop it. If you really don’t want to pay developers for their work, don’t buy addons through the marketplace. But seriously it’s the price of a damn pizza. Get over it.

38

I have mixed feelings about the commercialisation of AddOns for Blender.
My main concern is, that for every function where there is a commercial addon, now, the development in free Blender on that topic will slow down. Who will now optimize the retopo in free Blender, when there is your impressive addon?

At the moment AFAIK all AddOns are only for workflow and the saved blend doesn’t depend on the addon, right?
Nothing is more frustrating than to open old files and discover, that some important Addons are missing. And maybe some AddOns are no longer available. I have had this with some 3ds max and Maya projects. It’s so anoying.
(EDIT: Or you get a file from someone and a special AddOn is required)

I would welcome some solution, where the availability of all addons is ensured. If the addon will become free after some time (and maybe part of the trunk), than I would support it. (No, it’s no contradiction to want to pay to get it later for free)
I have paid a lot to the blender foundation over the years, with the conviction to support free and open source software. And now the creeping commercalisation will divide the blender user in one group that can afford some features and one that can’t afford them.

If the market will become a success, than you’ll have to buy lot of addons over the time. And Blender will be only a small base and you have to pay to be able to work with it. I don’t want this future.

39

Hi, My name is Vitor Balbio i’m the main developer of the Cogumelo Softwork.
I have not the habit of commenting on posts here about Blender Market but i think it’s not a flame thread as others before (hope it don’t become one too :wink: ). So let me explain the Cogumelo position about all this.

MotionTool and Baketool will (probably) never adopt crowd funding models as described before and that’s why:

1) Professional and continuum support and development needs continuum funding.
I think it’s self explanatory and quite obvious, but i want to pay attention to one point said before. People can say that continuum development without pay for updates is impossible but it’s not truth, see Pixologic and Zbrush, people are getting free updates since Zbrush 3 (more than 5 years ) without pay a cent. How this is possible? When you Market is growing you will ever have some incoming, that’s the same concept of selling games for mobile in a long run, you just need to keep your costs compatible. There’s no better time to invest on these kind of market model than now with Blender been increasingly adopted by professionals around the world. That’s our audience, professionals that need the job done and can/want to pay for a professional tool with professional support.

2) A single bunch of money will not cover the costs forever.
Quite obvious too… furthermore is quite impossible calculate with safety a value for more than some years of development and support… money can lose value, we can face a economic crisis (other…) , people can die or get sick… how we can forecast all things that can happen in a long run? If things going bad we need flexibility to e.g make a promotional discount, increase the values… and a single payment is totally inflexible.

3) If you don’t can/want to pay for our products probably you don’t need they.
MotionTool and BakeTool are very specific products for accelerate the work for professionals. We don’t expect that everyone adopt it cause probably you can get the same results without it ( with a lot more work of course, but you can ). So if you are a hobbyist you really need that tools? You really need full support? I know that would be great have all these things for free but that cost money and time for us…

4) Donation is good just not for our actual products.
If it don’t work to us today does’t mean we will never create addons that way in the future… We think it’s a very valid solution for fund raiser and can be done for lot of addons… It really can be applied. We think that it’s just do not fit the continuum development model that we want to apply to MotionTool and BakeTool. However, as mentioned before, that way of development have nothing to do with BlenderMarket.

I think that is it. We know that some can think that’s not good, that we are not contributing for blender ecosystem (even if 10% of all our incoming go direct to BF Blender Development Found ) but that’s ok, we do not have the pretension to please everyone, sure we can’t. We just want to offer to the blender community, professional solutions to those who need.

Cheers! :wink:

40

Huh? You didn’t? But you said:

So what’s your issue then?

I know, you just don’t want to be the one to compensate them. So start a crowd source idea where everyone else pays for the development of the addons you want to use. We get what you’re saying.

In what universe would this be true? Vitorbalbio addresses this in great detail above this post. But it’s already be covered before that that’s very unrealistic. There is a reason why more people aren’t using fundraisers as the default solution for developing and selling a product.