[Bf-committers] Re: EU have a dream? Blender in 2012!

[Chris Want]

Ton Roosendaal wrote:
> To Davide: I am not intended to have long winded discussions on this 
> list on this topic. If needed there will be forum and/or mailing list. 
> You can also mail me personal.

I would rather keep discussions of this topic on this
list rather than creating a new one -- I'm subscribed to
enough lists as it is, and I think this topic effects
enough developers that it is neither off topic nor noise.

Having said all of that, I would be very cautious to
go after subsidy money that might send Blender down
a road that it can't pull out of. The Google SoC
grants are cool because they allow some coders to
work on projects that might not go ahead otherwise,
and there is no obligation for to integrate the
resulting code if it turns out the project isn't a good
overall fit for what we want (or if the code isn't ready
for primetime). The EU projects strike me as something
that would have to be implemented, even if after an
initial development period it becomes clear that
the project is a bad idea. An example of this
kind of "lock in" was seen during the NaN years
when the business plan focused on the game engine
and web plugins, despite that most users really
wanted to use Blender as a modeler/renderer/animation
package.

Chris