08.23.20
Gemini version available ♊︎The Hand Inside the Blender: Microsoft Money for Blender’s Development Fund is Not a ‘Cookie Jar’ Donation But Another Power Move
Summary: Microsoft keeps paying, conditionally, a bunch of high-profile Free software projects; there’s expectation they will reciprocate one way or another, shows recent history
THE Blender project is a fantastic project. It’s a Free software success story. I love Blender and I love movies made with Blender. I fell in love with the project well over a decade ago. I’ve watched their movies more times than I can remember (probably about 20 times in total). Blender’s ‘daddy’ Ton Roosendaal (@tonroosendaal) wrote this when Microsoft announced the takeover of GitHub: “Why was Blender not on @github? Simple: Github already accepted $350M (at least) from venture capitalists – who want it back with huge profits. And whatever Microsoft pays for it, they will want it back too. Who pays in the end? The users. FYI: Blender has its code on http://git.blender.org and developer services on http://developer.blender.org – we already host our own services since 2002. About “users paying”: I don’t mean the freemium model. I believe that in due time @github services slowly degrade to losing control and ownership of your work.”
“We’re not saying there’s such an expectation wrt GitHub, but as we saw in Godot Engine there tends to be an expectation that C# and .NET will be boosted in GitHub (and that’s an explicit goal of the money).”Blender is not invulnerable to bribes though, e.g. through Blender’s Development Fund. Last month it was Microsoft (they buy influence over the project this way) and now it’s Mono pushers (Unity). What next? Will demands be made? What strings are being attached to this month’s payment? We’re not saying there’s such an expectation wrt GitHub, but as we saw in Godot Engine there tends to be an expectation that C# and .NET will be boosted in GitHub (and that’s an explicit goal of the money). These aren’t donations; Microsoft’s shareholders aren’t donating money, as they clearly want something in return. We previously wrote about how Microsoft was bribing projects (“helping” them) to defect to GitHub, entrapping their developers and users in Microsoft territories with Microsoft accounts.
“It’s not a donation; it’s more like an investment in the VC sense. It’s about control.”Yesterday in IRC we researched the state of Blender wrt GitHub and we reached out by E-mail to another person who had “checked Blender several times in the past.” (For this purpose)
“I believe it was always a mirror,” he told us. “Any project can mirror free software. it’s a non-issue. nothing that can be done but to make the software less free.”
We’re going to keep our eyes on Blender and see what Microsoft (and its Mono pushers) want in return from Blender. It’s not a donation; it’s more like an investment in the VC sense. It’s about control. █
ᶃ Gemini Space
This post is also available in 
Content is available under CC-BY-SA