[Bf-committers] The future of FBX and/or other formats in Blender

[Fabio Pesari]

On 02/10/2016 04:44 PM, Ton Roosendaal wrote:
> A crowd-funder for 1 feature only is very risky. What precisely do we define to fund? Who would crowdfund a developer to just fix bugs and maintenance for 2 years? I doubt people would pay for that. I wouldn't even know where to find such a coder...
> 
> For 2.8 we can do a big fund raiser, and include this on the work planning. I think professionals rather see us to keep working on the whole pipeline, starting with good PBR shader editing in viewports. 

Why don't you do a fundraiser organized like this:

Feature X   [---]
Feature Y   [---------]
Feature Z   [------]
Maintenance [-----]
Marketing   [--]
=========================================
Total       [---------------------------]

When people donate, they can choose where to put their money and if they
don't, it goes to "Maintenance" by default, so most donors will fund
that. Also, any excess money from the implementation of other features
also goes to "Maintenance".

It'd be even better if there were set goals for each feature (for
example, $40k for Feature X, and of course no limit on "Maintenance"),
so people would know how much they have to donate in order to make sure
the feature they need is implemented (with a disclaimer, of course).

I think a lot more people are willing to donate if they know exactly
where their money is going.

I think generic fundraisers often fail because there aren't set
objectives. The FSF recently managed to reach their goal because they
set a reasonable one ($450k), and they aren't nearly as popular as
Blender (you could say the industry hates them).