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](https://www.blender.org/about/license/) 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/