I mean… funding is good, but heck, Adobe is one of those companies that doesn’t have a great track record of being nice, fair or kind. See for example, their “year subscription billed monthly” lockin.
What’s in this for them?
…because I flat out don’t believe for an instant they’re doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.
Blender is starting to get strong traction in the industry, and will likely eat Autodesk alive in the following decades (at least the 3D modelling part of its business). It may be a way of ensuring they stay relevant; for example, if tools like Photoshop "play well" with Blender, users are less likely to switch to something else.
Last time I checked, blender didn’t do solid modeling or understand tolerances - has this changed? Can it really be used for industrial design, or is it really just a competitor to the animation software that autodesk makes?
I'm not in the industrial design field so I'll point out that Blender is also a competitor to Autodesk's offerings in VFX, game design, and 2D painting/animation.
It's not as if adobe is a singular person whom makes strategic decisions on what projects the company donates to. Someone in the company wants to donate to blender foundation, so they do. Case closed.
An exec at John Deere donated 500,000 to a 501c3 (non lobbying) for right to repair, which John deer the company matched. Doesn't mean the company is going to be supporting it anytime soon.
If we want to get into hypotheticals, it's within adobies line of products to get into 3D. Maybe they want to look into copy+pasting blender for their product line.
> An exec at John Deere donated 500,000 to a 501c3 (non lobbying) for right to repair, which John deer the company matched.
This is much like Mark Zuckerberg's donation to Diaspora [1], the decentralized and open source social network. It's a token donation to the opposition that isn't really viewed as a substantial threat. It can be pointed to internally and externally as a fig leaf, but it doesn't yield any strategic edge. It's cheap posturing, and it works.
There can also be some "the enemy of my enemy" involved. Does Adobe even have any products that compete with Blender? Other companies have, and they might also have products that compete with Adobe.
Yeah, Adobe has been pushing into the stock photo space for a while now.
They sell 3d assets and that portion of the company probably doesn't care what you use them in. Besides if they get you buying assets from them it is another channel to sell on.
I'm working on a video project and I needed to create a nuclear explosion animation.
After Effects doesn't have the physics engine necessary to make something like that, so it comes with a trial version of Maxon Cinema 4D. However that version is pretty limited and couldn't do what I needed. Presumably if I paid Maxon I could get the "full version" or whatever, but instead I went with Blender, which proved to be a very good tool.
Meanwhile, After Effects was effectively rendered (pun intended) irrelevant in that process. I assume Adobe is aware of this kind of thing and wants to keep itself as relevant as possible.
Is it really in Google's control whether or not Firefox lives? The only connection Firefox has seems to be that Google is one of its sponsors in exchange of being its primary search engine. I don't think they'd go that far as to intentionally denying Firefox users access to their sites even if they wanted, because that'd immediately draw some lawsuits.
> I don't think they'd go that far as to intentionally denying Firefox users access to their sites even if they wanted, because that'd immediately draw some lawsuits.
This already happened, some sites wouldn't work in Firefox unless Firefox had the Chrome user agent string.
Also who is going to sue them? Firefox? That's like kicking yourself in the balls.
Perhaps they see this as a way to get some measure of influence over Blender's future direction, which would be strategically valuable. Or maybe it's to give themselves cover when they're accused of being anti-competitive, etc.
> Adobe is one of those companies that doesn’t have a great track record of being nice, fair or kind. See for example, their “year subscription billed monthly” lockin.
You must have had some concerns when other large companies were given board seats of other open source products because they had thrown hundreds of thousands of dollars? No?
You said 'one of those companies'. So I'm sure there are companies worse than Adobe that are already doing it. Then we will later complain that they will use this as a way of controlling the project.
> …because I flat out don’t believe for an instant they’re doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.
Don't blame you for your skepticism, but once the money rolls in, then everything is forgotten; as always.
Adobe bought Substance not too long ago. They might be working on better integration with Blender so that they can sell more subscriptions for that product.
There's charging for software, and there's "switching our billing to monthly (only if you engage for a year) that costs multiple of our previous one-time payment over the average lifespan of the software product", with abusive practices like "license is per user, or per computer which costs multiple times more" because they know it's for schools and such, which don't have a choice but to teach their software.
Adobe are a grade A asshole company abusing their near monopoly in their niches.
Charging money for software is perfectly fine. But marketing a "monthly" subscription but having a yearly lock-in is anti-consumer. My guess is you don't know about that part? If you subscribe to $9.99/mo photoshop you can't cancel two months in without paying 75% of your remaining subscription cost for the entire year.
Adobe’s billing practices use all kinds of dark patterns though. Let’s say you have an annual subscription billed monthly that renews on January 1. When the monthly charge comes through on the 1st of January (like it has every month) and you realize your one year subscription is up and would like to cancel most places would either (a) refund the January 1 charge and immediately shut off your service or (b) keep the January 1 charge and shut off your service at the end of the month. But Adobe, Adobe opts for (c) na-na-poo-poo read the fine print - we got you for another year of monthly charges, sucker!
it depends on the product. After Effects you can pay monthly and cancel anytime. Photoshop only has yearly subscriptions paid either monthly or all at once.
Some people who buy don't see the "annual subscription" detail and then whine later
They specifically hide the details of the yearly subscription when you signup, and it’s the default option. The renewal, regardless of purchase date, is jan 1, the least likely time for people to be paying attention, and the renewal notice only lists them monthly charge. When you cancel, regardless of the amount of time remaining (that you still pay for), your subscription is terminated at the end of that month.
Yeah yeah, whinge whinge… but does it really make you feel better about yourself to mock others who have been basically scammed out of money by not reading the fine print?
Does it really matter which company does this kind of thing?
That seems quite mean to me… and that uncaring corporate profit at the cost of everything else is “the Adobe way”.
The other posts about Adobe wanting to create a paid marketplace to “monetise” blender seems to be the reason they’re doing this.
It's great to see free software projects get stable funding, but I'm surprised to see the amount they're contributing is so low at €30,000/year. Just €2,500/month is probably a great ROI on PR for Adobe.
> Better with Blender, together: Adobe partners with Blender on development fund and new plugins
> [...]
> First, I am thrilled to announce that we’re joining the Blender Development Fund to help ensure the longevity and success of this dynamic open-source community. Additionally, we are going to help creators work with the best of Adobe right in Blender by launching two new plugins — Substance 3D [2] in Blender and Mixamo Auto-Control Rig Plugin [3] for Blender (both now available, in beta).
--
All in all, these plugins sound like marketplaces for Shaders and Animation Curves, respectively
Good for Blender to get Supported from Adobe for it's development. I believe that Blender will become more awesome from this sponsorship.
> ensure the longevity and success of this dynamic open-source community
Nice. But, Can you(Adobe) please also make Photoshop and other Adobe products available on Linux as well ? It would really benefit Open Source community.
A lot of people won't switch to Linux for specifically these programs as they use them in their daily lives or for work. Just availability would promote the growth of Linux and while not 100% supporting open source in a purist sense it would be a welcome way for normal users to get their feet wet.
The classic Adobe applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects) are likely third party encumbered in such a way that a Linux build is all but impossible. I can only imagine the amount of binary crap 20 years out of support that has gone into it over the years.
I'm of a different persuasion: better to not have Adobe software on Linux. It'll give a bit more space for alternatives (as it's already doing), and Cthulhu knows we need that. It's not perfect, but it's a start.
Linux user since somewhere around 2001 - 2003 here:
I use a mix of proprietary and free software at any time.
I guess most Linux users are like me: using it mainly because (for me) it provides a superior experience all the way from installation, through painless maintenance, fantastic desktop usability (for me) and extremely much better performance.
The last one is worth emphasizing:
1. the compiles are relevant for me are consistently around 30% faster on Linux
2. starting executables (and this includes git) is so much faster that using anything else afterwards feels just dumb.
We're in a world where most people predominantly use proprietary software on proprietary operating systems. Many people are tied to those platforms because key parts of their workflows keep them from migrating - in this case, people who use Adobe's tools as their daily drivers would have a hard time moving to Linux.
If Adobe made their software available on Linux, that would allow many people to migrate, which would in turn help expose those people to lots of other F/OSS software, which would then build up their userbase over time.
None of this would happen instantaneously, of course, but there's a precedent for this sort of "small" change causing large shifts. For example, OS X having a unix foundation was the trigger for the gradual (but eventually large-scale) move of software developers towards macs.
Assume for a moment that people are going to want to run the proprietary applications either way. Would you rather that they run proprietary applications on a proprietary operating system, or that they run proprietary applications on an open source operating system?
More likely Adobe don't want to do the Linux because they would need to have a support department for Linux, it is more money for them to pay the employees to provide technical support for Linux.
Keep in mind, Photoshop been around more than 30 years. They likely to have legacy codes in the software that can turn ugly in Linux. PS have a behemoth codebase, it will take them a while... a long while to port to Linux along with the plugins and everything else.
My guess: Autodesk. Maya and Max are Autodesk's cash cows. Blender is attack said cash cows and thus weakening Autodesk who Adobe might be seeing as a competitor in other realms. Weak reasoning I know. At such a low dollar sponsorship it could just be Adobe uses Blender for their commercials or something else trivial.
What gives you the idea that these tools are cash cows? It's quite then opposite, really. In FY20, Mesia and Entertainment was 5% of Autodesk's revenue as per their own report.
I think this is Adobe hedging their bets against Autodesk as they don't have a full 3D DCC software suite. There are 3d modelling and rendering features in some products, but they are just in a supporting role.
Actually, looking it up, it just like adobe just released some procedural modelling for Substance a la Houdini, Grasshopper, Sverchok et al. That's really exciting to me, I really love procedural anything. And they do have Stager for setting up scenes, and Modeler (formerly Oculus Medium) for sculpting. I haven't used substance in a while, nor the adobe stuff, just a hobby I haven't had a lot of spare time for :).
However, even with Adobe, I'm really tempted to give them the benefit of the doubt in this case no matter what their own product plans are. With how companies/studios' 3D pipelines are, you can't lock your customers into all your tools. I'm assuming what Adobe would like is "blender users will have a Substance subscription, and have access to our assets marketplace"
I guess the good part is really getting to be a solid part of the list of "suites your tool should support".
Blender has too much steam now. Proprietary modeling software is going to have a hard time competing with free. Adobe realizes this, and they're going to tool their products such as Substance to be as Blender-compatible as they can.
It'll be interesting if Blender starts encroaching on Adobe's moat. Not sure what Adobe will be able to do if/when that happens.
I'm curious if this can happen with the game engine world too, but Godot is too far removed from Unity and Unreal to even be comparable. It's a shame CRYENGINE isn't open source, though it's a bit dated at this point. Maybe Lumberyard?
Yep - Lumberyard was just partially rewritten / open sourced under the "Open 3D Engine Foundation" with the LF -- just announced like a week ago or something:
Adobe is investing seriously in 3D now (with buying Allegorithmic), which as someone who is forced to use their software because of my industry I'd be ok with but they've instead decided that now your "Creative Cloud" subscription only applies to 2D creativity because all the 3D software they've just acquired is now an seperate subscription on top of that.
Not to mention their software all still basically ships as yearly versions, we now just have to pay for every years updates when before you could say buy one year, skip two, buy the next.
I have to admit, I'm a bit concerned about Blender's future development.
I've been a Blender user for 15 years, I jumped on somewhere before the 2.4 redesign.
There have been some really awesome advances in Blender over the past two years. Things that really changed my typical workflow in an absolutely good way, Eevee and all of the node work for a couple amazing new additions.
They've also changed a lot of things, namely keybindings, UI, certain modifiers, that had been done in a certain way, and that I'd committed to muscle memory, for over a decade. Those changes also had the effect of breaking years worth of accumulated tutorials and bookmarks as the workflows they mentioned are not longer relevant.
It's intensely aggravating to spend 10 minutes figuring out how to do something that you used to know how to do with the flick of a wrist. Especially when you fall back to searching how to perform the action and only find 4 year old stackoverflow posts which state the old way to do it.
I've even recently taken a weekend reimplementing the old full color icons, which required a full custom compilation, due to the lack of contrast in the new uneditable monochrome replacements.
I fully admit this may just be my initial steps into the grumbly guy who doesn't like change in my software. But I can't help but compare Blender to Firefox.
Awesome tech and a great mission, sometimes aggravating UI and workflow changes, important relationships with would be rivals.
As someone who is also still on Firefox, my opinion is that loads of cash didn't necessarily turn out great for them either.
For me at least I consider my custom hacked up, modified keybindings as best they can be, Blender to be nearly feature complete for the work I do. It's awesome that it being opensource has allowed me to nudge it in the direction that works for me. Like I said though, as a long time user I am a bit concerned.
I think the biggest motivation behind the UI change is that Blender's old UI was just very non-standard (and not exactly intuitive either). Now it's close to the others, so I'll imagine there won't be any large changes until some massive shakeup (VR becoming common?) happens.
A lot of documentation being outdated definitely sucks though.
I've started with Blender after the UI changes and wouldn't have otherwise (I know, because I've tried several times).
The next x users are many more than the current y users.
Annoying the y for no reason would be stupid. But not making improvements for the x because the y were there first is a recipe for declining relevance.
This is part of my concern, as well as the potential dilution of power features. See Firefox's recent decision to stop supporting the compact styling due to low usage.
It is a topic which does have ongoing discussion within the Blender community going back a few years [1].
Maya has the most impressive C++ SDK I've ever seen. It tells you so much about how Maya is coded. With the SDK you get just as much power as the developers of Maya get, the same tools.
idk about maya I was thinking about flash when I wrote this. but same with blender. python api a bit clunky but ui is really amazing. really made me appreciate artist-coders as they have a really unique ui
Just tried OpenSCAD for the first time a bit ago, really cool technology. But the inbuilt editor is a bit of a pain, and the language design is a bit odd... it feels as if they took a lisp and tried to hammer it into C-style syntax without following any C-style semantics.
I'd absolutely love to see the renderer brought into something like a VS Code webview and maybe even adopting a real Lisp for the code.
Adobe is doing this to weaken one of its greatest competitors, Autodesk.
Additionally, Adobe's software works well with Blender as part of a comprehensive design suite. They'll likely increase the number of subscribers in the short term by doing this.
The danger to Adobe would be if Gimp and Inkscape got anywhere near as high quality as Blender.
As pointed out by a few comments on one of my threads [1], Amazon is doing the same thing to Unity and Epic Games' Unreal Engine with their open sourced Lumberyard engine, O3DE. Amazon is going to make money from Prime Games and Twitch. If their move succeeds, an engine is just a commodity.
What’s in this for them?
…because I flat out don’t believe for an instant they’re doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.