Microsoft joins the Blender Development Fund

“just asking the point of constantly bringing up Autodesk on non-Autodesk news” – Well.. I could ask why bother read these comments if autodesk criticism comments are annoying? Its just good to remind that blender is better than autodesk – its free (in many ways – but its good to support blender and even microsoft is good enough to support blender foundation which will fund blender project), it can not be owned by some greedy company (like autodesk which tried to get monopolyg by buying 3 awesome softwares which they all most killed -well they have owned 3d studio long time and it was good at some point but then they got greedy with subscription and they “killed” the development of all these 3 softwares.. and there is other softwares too like mudbox… and its development is dead because of ad). And yes: its good to remind every single time how autodesk killed Softimage development. Also 3dsmax and maya development was long time in wrong direction and their only innovation is rental licensing/subscription. Its good to remind how autodesk is evil – killing softimage, naiad and many ohter good softwares. Its not just for fun – its just for reminding people (new 3d artist) that you can’t trust for AD. And i did use Softimage, Maya even 3DS max before Autodesk spoiled them so its just hate and its good to remember that why i hate AD. Just like Apple and Shake and Aperture and then stop 32bit support and soon after that they say “we are going for arm processors” so there was no point dropping 32bit support from x86 arcitechture.

Mental Ray wasn’t exactly their fault. NVIDIA bought Mental Images, with it Mental Ray. Then NVIDIA discontinued it in 2017, not Autodesk. Autodesk bought Arnold, and now includes that as a replacement. They could have done much better with the render nodes licensing with Arnold, though. Someone used to unlimited nodes to having to buy them for the same price as a workstation license…

Good thing is that there is multiple versions / branches from blender for example blender for artist – so anyone can keep developing it for different direction by needs. Sure these sponsors can say where the priority should be but thats it.. they can just make wishes for priorities for current development road and but more money for features they want/need but mostly its just for priorities and thats it. Most of these companies has also offered own coders for optimizing code or make it support some hardware like nvidia (cuda) and amd (opencl, vulkan).

Your wait is over. Blender started out as a commercial product and now it is open source. I’d say that’s a shift to the extreme done to please market forces. You ask where things were done to please a person, my suggestion is that capital, where money the money does or does not come from, has always shaped Blender’s direction. It is open source because it failed as a commercial product. Now it has a found new sources of finance. That should again shape the company’s direction.
The video you linked to has a quote in the title: “Money doesn’t interest me.” And you say my statement is braindead. Unless his wife and kids, his landlord and grocery store also share his lack of interest in money, I can’t see how that works. And, let’s not forget, we are here talking about a deal with a company (Microsoft) that was founded by one of the richest men in the world. (That means he has lots of money BTW).
A guy who has no interest in money taking a call from Microsoft while saying he has no interest in money. And you believe it. Well….
You seem pretty smug in your post.
I think you over estimate your intelligence.
But I will take your advice where you suggest ignore super annyoying commenters You’re right there, it’s not that hard.

the thing is about priorities – What Ton really says in this interview is that he sees money as a means to achieve true goals, not the other way round (using software development or other activity as means to get more money) I believe it is generally the right perspective, after all money is just an exchange for some things that have real value – like in it’s very essence – that what money is. It is a pity our world seems to see money as some objective and necessity. Plus Ton did the open source move with Blender – for the love of Blender which he was one of the coders not for the sake of money (the financial success of the company wchich “failed commercially”) that’s why BF is a non profit – with a goal to develop Blender as a tool for artists – the basic difference between a bussiness and an NGO. Simple enough and not at all naive. Workers of the BF and assciated entities are surely also earning money for their living but it’s still a bit different approach than a stock market Corpo which aims for profit as it’s main and most important goal.

Autodesk never bought 3dsMax. It was an Autodesk product since 3DS DOS v1,

Both Kinetik and Discreet were Autodesk subsidiaries.

Yes Gates is retired from the company and the new CEO at Microsoft has a net worth of $387 million. Whats missing from the article is the amount of money these organizations are funding Blender at and how is that money distributed. Is “Branch A” making more money than Branch B because they are working on an outside-funded part of development? IS Branch A bringing in new people and paying them because they have a skillset Microsoft needs and long-time developers in Branch B, the people who have built Blender’s opensource success feel like they opened the door and now other people are walking in and out with cash?
There’s a lot of details I don’t know or really care to know.

3DS Dos was created by a group of people working under Autodesk. They eventually became Kinetix, still part of Autodesk, and was only placed under the Discreet label once Autodesk acquired Discreet around Max v4 or v5.