European Union Contributes To Blender Development

kyknos.org writes "As officially announced yesterday, the European committee has granted 1.9 Million euro funding to Uni-verse. This three-year cooperation project around Verse, a 3d network protocol, intends to develop a networked open source 3D platform which includes collaborative tools, 3D rendering systems and acoustics simulation. As partner in the Uni-verse consortium, the Blender Foundation has been granted 140.000 euro to finance further professionalizing services at blender.org, and enable long term research and development support for a next generation open source 3D tool. The consortium has been founded by the Stockholm Technical University (KTH), which also employs the original Verse developers Eskil Steenberg and Emil Brink. The other development partners are the Interactive Institute Sweden, the Helsinki University of Technology, the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics and the Blender Foundation. Application testing and content creation will be done by Paregos Mediadesign Sweden and MinusPlus architects in Hungary."

Embarassing

[0x0d0a]

The EU is out contributing to a piece of software that the entire world will benefit from. What's happening in the United States? Well...we have a couple of big corporate interests donating some money. That's about it. Government spending is for promoting overseas use of Microsoft products. Sigh.

There are days when the U S of A has an awfully hard time inspiring patriotism in me...

Re:Embarassing

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because we all know that socialism is the way to go.

So sad that while you were trying to be sarcastic, what you said was absolutely true. Why else is it that the socialist Euro is rocketing in value while the capitalist US dollar plummets? Why is it that US programmers are being laid off and outsourced to India, while the EU software industry booms? Why is it that poor Americans can't afford medical care, while in socialist Europe everyone gets treated, and the rich still have the option of choos

Re:Embarassing

[iota]

The EU is out contributing to a piece of software that the entire world will benefit from. What's happening in the United States? Well...we have a couple of big corporate interests donating some money. That's about it. Government spending is for promoting overseas use of Microsoft products. Sigh.

The EU is contributing to a project that primarily based in the EU. The Stichting Blender Foundation is based in The Netherlands. An EU country. Therefore, the financial contributions do not leave the EU -- this is a major point.
Certainly, developers / contributors are from all around the world, but it is much easier to justify contributing to the "local" (well at least Euro-based) economy that it is to justify contibuting to a foriegn economy.
Also, although a very cool project, the claim that "the entire world will benefit from [it]" is dubious at best. In the grand scale of things, Blender is totally insignificant.

There are days when the U S of A has an awfully hard time inspiring patriotism in me...

If all it takes for the USA to "inspire patriotism in [you]" is to throw a few thousand at an open source package then 1. you are a cheap vote and 2. look around, there are quite a lot of projects that have been sponsored by the US government which the world now benefits from. The simpliest example is the internet itself.

That said -- this is great news for blender.org!

Re:Embarassing

[dago]

"Therefore, the financial contributions do not leave the EU -- this is a major point."

False, Hungary isn't part of the EU and won't be this year. Other countries also benefit from various EU-funded project. Ok, it's neighboring countries mostly.

Re:Embarassing

[K3lvin]

False, Hungary isn't part of the EU and won't be this year.

Wrong, from the EU website [eu.int]:

The entry of eight central and eastern European countries together with Cyprus and Malta into the European Union on 1 May 2004 is a historic achievement, ending centuries of division. Europe reunited means a stronger, democratic and more stable continent, with a single market providing economic benefits for all its 450 million citizens.
--
The ten newcomers, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithua

Re:Embarassing

[dago]

Ok, but you know, when I was at school it was only 12 states, how d'you want me to remember all 25 ;)

please mod my previous post down under the earth so that not even google will notice my swap between Hungary and Bulgary .

-

Re:Embarassing

[Qwavel]

It would appear that you are intentionally misunderstanding the OP. When he says that this will benefit the whole world, he is referring to the fact that this is open source. He did not say that OSS is all it would take to make him patriotic. Please re-read his comment. As well, I should point out that his comments make sense: some of the EU countries are the best in the world for contributing to the world's overall well being. The US is pretty much always dead last. Of course, a statement like that should be backed up, so please read this study by the Washington station of the OECD: http://www.oecdwash.org/NEWS/LOCAL/oecdwash-apr200 2.pdf My comments are not meant to reflect on Americans as individuals (many of who are remarkably generous) but on the US as a country. (BTW, I am not American and not European.)

Re:Embarassing

[Golthar]

Hey,

You seem to forget that the US government also contributes to projects by ways of grants.

Re:Embarassing

[You're All Wrong]

"Contributing ... benefit ... "

Those weren't the first two words that went through my mind as I read the summary.
<<<
The other development partners are ... the Fraunhofer Institute
>>>

The first two words that went through my mind were "submarine" and "patent".

Hey, I guess we're both cynics.

YAW.

OpenBSD

[alan_dershowitz]

We helped fund OpenBSD development for quite some time. It's apparently over now, but we've all reaped the benefits of this in innumerable ways.

Re:OpenBSD

[0x0d0a]

I thought the funding to that got cancelled after Theo made some decidedly unpolitic statements.

[SCNR] Uh, what is...

[neglige]

... "a 3d network protocol"?

A protocol where server go up & down?

Re:[SCNR] Uh, what is...

[Pogue Mahone]

A protocol where server go up & down?

In my experience, servers go up & down all the time.

Re:[SCNR] Uh, what is...

[leerpm]

You must run Windows.

Whoa..

[Sri Ramkrishna]

Thats an awful lot of money to come up with a new kind of blender. You know it's those French chefs that are driving all this.

sri

They could have at least linked to the projects.

[voodoo1man]

Here [blender.org] is the Verse project page (it used to be on SourceForge for a while before now). The project is basically an implementation of what was once known as Virtual Reality on top of a more modern framework. It's been around for a couple of years (although for most of that time I think Eskil put it on hold as he could not actively develop it).

That being said, I think that Verse is far too low level for the things it is designed to do. I think the Open Croquet project holds far more promise, both because it has a very well developed object-oriented model of virtual worlds (it's based on top of Squeak Smalltalk), and because the scheme it is using for networking has some very good ideas and promises to scale quite nicely (it is based on David Reed's PhD thesis [squeakfoundation.org], and it's pretty surprising it hasn't been "rediscovered" before). You can see an impressive (but now quite a bit out of date) video [microsoft.com] of Alan Kay and another Croquet developer (sorry, I forgot his name!) giving a presentation on the project. Unfortunately, the early demo of the project received a lot of negative attention from some quite ignorant people, and as a result the development of Open Croquet is not currently open to the general public (although if you don't mind becoming a Squeak developer you can certainly participate in it).

Now as to what I think of the funding. It's certainly a lot of money, but I don't entirely agree with the purpose. I think too much of it will be spent on implementation (not that it's a bad thing, as it's all Free Software), but I don't think that either Blender nor Verse foster enough research. Mostly they are doing what has already been done, and at that I don't think they are doing it particularly well.