Join the Blender Development Fund

by 0x3b4f0d1bfcb2ffe8aadaa455d0f03210f848c915 (jin)

Should the following Tier 6: up to $240,000 USD, 6 months vesting (1 month cliff) grant in the Platform Contributor category be approved?

Abstract

Proposal to make a one-time donation to the Blender Foundation fund for their continued outstanding work of over 15 years building an open source 3D creation tool. This is an opportunity to support the infrastructure that millions of content creators use for creating, optimizing, and converting avatars and worlds.

In my opinion it is also a powerful PR move for the crypto industry to make regarding the open metaverse, similar to how mainstream cultural icons are buying and changing their pfps to NFTs. The Decentraland logo can sit above Steam (which recently banned crypto) and Google (which centralized much of the web).

Grant size

175,000 USD

Beneficiary address

0x9De8991C56F622175274fb358f981AF6F903a799

Description

This proposal is partly inspired by this great post, "We Need More Open Source in Gaming": https://a16z.com/2016/06/01/open-source-gaming-vr/

"A rising tide lifts all boats."

Blender is an open source 3D content-creation program that lays at the center of 3D workflows like an indispensible swiss army knife tool. Its used by millions of people - in 2020 alone there were 14M downloads. The subreddit has almost 500k members and there have been over 100 books published covering Blender.

As a creator that's made virtual worlds and avatars across dozens of platforms (including Decentraland) I've used Blender for:

• creating, fixing, and optimizing 3D models and avatars
• converting between different 3D file formats (great glTF support)
  • 20k meebits were made into usable avatar files using Blender
• High quality renders, lightmapping, and animations
• Exporting content directly to web based virual worlds

Features include 3D modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, raster graphics editing, rigging and skinning, fluid and smoke simulation, particle simulation, soft body simulation, sculpting, animating, match moving, rendering, motion graphics, video editing, and compositing.

One of the foundation's goals is "to give the worldwide Internet community access to 3D technology in general, with Blender as a core". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_Foundation

Blender is GPL licensed, ensuring that the code will be free as a public good for all time. It protects the developer and user community from malicious patents, hostile forks, lock-down attempts, bait-and-switch-to-closed. Other software that is GPL licensed include the Linux kernel and wordpress. Learn more

It'll be iconic for Decentraland to be the first crypto-native project to be a sponsor and have its logo displayed here next to tech giants like Google, Facebook, Apple, Unity, Epic, Nvidia, Steam, Microsoft, etc: https://i.imgur.com/oK3sIrw.png

Costs for corporate gold (based on 11/3 MANA price of $2.88):

~12,100 MANA per year ~60.5k MANA for 5 years

It's ~ <1% of the MANA released (https://vesting.decentraland.org/#/0x7a3abf8897f31b56f09c6f69d074a393a905c1ac), a small cost to send a large industry message about where we stand on software freedom and the open metaverse. I think it's a smart PR move, like how Visa bought a Cryptopunk.

Blender currently employs 26 full time employees, and 12 freelancers remotely. Unity has over 5000. We need more open source in gaming.

Link: https://fund.blender.org/

Specification

This is a one time donation to Blender fund which in return will get the Decentraland Logo next to the likes of Google, Steam, Adobe, Microsoft, Activision, etc. I'll continue to advocate for public goods funding across the twittersphere to help ensure an open metaverse ecosystem thrives over the next decade.

Personnel

Blender Foundation info:

• https://fund.blender.org/about/
• https://www.blender.org/about/people/
• https://www.blender.org/about/foundation/

Roadmap and milestones

Blender Foundation will actively reach out to Corporate members to discuss the bi-annual planning for grants and review past supported projects.

https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO