Remember, guys; being a patron of an open source project is not the same as being an investor at a company.
FOSS users:
Big tech leeches off FOSS and never gives back!
Also FOSS users:
These big tech companies should stay out of our favorite projects, thei money is poison!
And this is why we can't have nice things.
Well yeah, capitalists playbook.
Give money to thing, people who do thing are grateful but wary. People who do thing are able to do more thing with the money and become reliant on the money, then corporation starts putting the lean on them to push agenda while threatening to pull funding that the thing needs now.
They support well established projects and foundations that broke the corporate glass to push their agenda on those projects but not single user projects that they use in their closed source software.
Discussion on Blender Artists forum. If you want extra cortisol today.
edit:
My prediction... their 2026 financial report gonna see a huge drop for small donation from individuals.
I think it's more worrying that Blender has been merging Claude code for a while now. Maybe Anthropic is going to give main devs free tokens now to incentivate the use.
I wonder if Blender's actually received any actual real money from Anthropic, or if its just like, money hasn't actually changed hands yet.
I know its not uncommon for big open source projects to accept money and sponsorships from corporations, but idk where Anthropic would really get the cash to even do this. AFAIK they're still staying afloat on investor cash and are burning way more money running models than they can realistically charge people to use them.
This is the other reason Blender should steer clear of Anthropic.
AI is a bullshit industry that isn't profitable and it is all going to collapse sooner or later, Blender should pursue sponsors that are actual profitable businesses that will be around in 5 years.
As a man of wealth and taste, I am also interested in sponsoring Blender.
a man of wealth and taste
What's puzzling me is the nature of their game... (Cit.)
I hope you guessed their name.
Welp, that's Blender fucked then. It's just a matter of time.
You know a bunch of other companies you may dislike also fund blender too, right?
How many of them are known to make a tool that ruins everything it touches?
I looked up the list and laughed. A lot.
Doesn't sound that bad, does it?
A lot of open source projects take money from companies to develop their stuff.
It's not like Blender is forced to integrate AI now.
I think this is a net good.
I may just be being overly cynical, but once big corporations start giving money to these kinds of things, it's not a big stretch for them to start influencing things in their favour for their money. I hope I'm wrong.
I hope you're wrong too!
I believe projects are not all the same. Some projects might be quick to bend the knee, but others would never.
Depends how the Blender team works I guess :)
It is FOSS, so if it takes a turn to the worse I am sure they will be forked quickly 😄
I am sure they will be forked quickly
ooh-err Missus!
Bro how do you think Blender has been getting money all this time?
I haven't really been keeping abreast of the situation. I'm only going by a gut reaction to this article. I'm happy to be proven wrong about this.
They are sponsored by major corps like nvidia, meta,amd. Despite this they've continued to put out a good Foss product. I think they'll resist undue influence from antropic.
But I do think they'll integrate ai inas they're working on that at the moment.
Fucking disappointing as hell, Blender has so much potential and getting side tracked into useless AI crap will be a massive drain on productivity and improvement on the core Blender software.
It’s not like Blender is forced to integrate AI now.
from anthropic’s announcement: "The Blender developers have created an MCP connector, which is now officially available for Claude."
MCP stands for "modern context protocol" and is a tech developed by anthropic for ai integration. in effect, yes, blender is forced to integrate ai. not claude specifically, mind you, but still.
It’s ’model complex protocol’ and you can’t stop people from making them to integrate with software. Basically you can create instructions so that the agent can use other software. I bet even w/o entropic there are already more than one on GitHub.
It blew my mind when I played with the godot mcps for the first time not gonna lie.
Okay, but how bad is that?
It is just an interface, or am i missing something here?
Anthropic has no control over the project.
They sponsored a feature that is still open to anyone to use or not use.
The project is intact for all I can tell?
Think about MCPs as an API for AI. It's just an interface that let's AI do a set of predetermined tasks/configurations. It'll very likely be used for model generation via a prompt
Yeah, i get the gist of it.
Its just that I don't really see a problem with Blender creating an API.
There are 2 options:
I don't see how this is bad, honestly.
Blender will be fine. They can't make changes without going through pull requests and audits. At most, you might see some kind of Claude add-on. Totally opt-in.
...Until we're convinced otherwise, of course.
idk why i like when Corporations donate/contribute to open source projects .
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.