[HN Gopher] Blender Foundation Annual Report 2020 [pdf]
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       Blender Foundation Annual Report 2020 [pdf]
        
       Author : Tomte
       Score  : 60 points
       Date   : 2021-05-07 17:09 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (download.blender.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (download.blender.org)
        
       | runningmike wrote:
       | Great report, with very personal note from Ton. Watched Ton at
       | https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/speaker/ton_roosend...
       | for who like moving images.
        
       | abdabab wrote:
       | How do you generate a pdf like this? It's pretty.
        
         | bserge wrote:
         | You can do it with Adobe Illustrator and/or InDesign.
        
         | fuzzer37 wrote:
         | Presumably LaTeX
        
         | rguetzkow wrote:
         | You need to hire the highly skilled Mike Newbon to design your
         | reports.
        
         | krastanov wrote:
         | I am a big fan of LaTeX for tasks like this, like the sibling
         | suggested, but this looks more like something done in Scribus
         | or similar software.
        
       | immmmmm wrote:
       | while i have almost no use of this software, it's one of the most
       | powerful open source tool around. i wish there was a similar
       | effort to make Freecad more reliable (my bad not helping btw).
       | 
       | also this has already been discussed and seems technically hard
       | to do, but if the UI toolkit would be standalone that would be
       | gold .. rarely seen sth of such quality
        
       | tomovo wrote:
       | Happy user here. Thanks to everyone involved! Blender is getting
       | so much better with every release, the magnitude & quality of new
       | features is unbelievable. Looking forward to 2.93.
        
       | tpmx wrote:
       | I'm just a casual Blender user, but to me the Blender Foundation
       | (run out of the Netherlands) is obviously a dramatically better
       | model on how to run an open source foundation compared to the Bay
       | area equivalents (e.g. Mozilla and Wikimedia).
       | 
       | There's so little nonsense! So much focus on the essentials. It's
       | incredibly refreshing.
       | 
       | I hope they can keep this focus as they grow. I suspect that not
       | being located in the Bay area may help here.
        
         | skeeter2020 wrote:
         | A CEO salary of < 80K also goes a long way to attracting the
         | right type of people for this role as well. My biggest
         | complaint about many leadership roles where the #1 goal is not
         | financial (i.e. government and NFP) is that it attracts the
         | wrong types of motives. I don't believe the typical defense
         | that "we need to compete with for-profit for access to the best
         | people".
         | 
         | The future of organizations like this sure seems to be
         | distributed, so global talent recruitment should be a real
         | advantage.
        
           | kevingadd wrote:
           | It's unfortunate that a salary in that bracket can rule out
           | some of the "right type of people" because they may have
           | prohibitive living expenses. If you've got kids to look after
           | or expensive medical bills suddenly that number ends up being
           | a lot smaller, and if you're not living in the mountains your
           | housing may eat the rest of it.
           | 
           | Thankfully for the Blender Foundation this is less likely to
           | be an issue, since based on the data they appear to largely
           | employ people in countries that have a healthy social safety
           | net. If expenses like health care don't come directly out of
           | the employee's pocket you can pay lower salaries no problem.
           | 
           | Personally as an American with health issues, I could never
           | consider a job at that salary, no matter how much I wanted
           | the job. Maybe if it came with a work visa so I could live in
           | another country with functioning social and health services
           | (but in some cases, non-citizens pay for that out of pocket).
        
           | tomcam wrote:
           | > My biggest complaint about many leadership roles where the
           | #1 goal is not financial (i.e. government and NFP) is that it
           | attracts the wrong types of motives.
           | 
           | Stone cold, unapologetic capitalist here. I had never
           | questioned that line of thinking until this minute. And,uh...
           | I agree completely! It can't be a coincidence that Tom and
           | the rest of the Blender people are doing such a spectacular
           | job.
        
         | jayd16 wrote:
         | Why exactly is it obviously dramatically better?
        
           | tomcam wrote:
           | My intuitive answer is that the foundation is precisely
           | focused on its mission and way less of a drama queen. Zero
           | public politics, apparently far less focus on fundraising and
           | raising of awareness on nonessential issues. Wikipedia, for
           | example, has a huge war chest but continues to fundraise.
           | That raises questions.
           | 
           | Blender is a lean, mean fighting machine and it's hard to
           | question a single Euro in its budget. That's pretty
           | impressive, and comforting to those of us who have
           | contributed.
        
         | tomcam wrote:
         | Well that made me read the report, which I had no intention of
         | doing. You're right, it's a model of its kind. And it really is
         | refreshing.
        
       | aidos wrote:
       | That's reminded me to check back in to see what the story is with
       | Apple Silicon support and it's in Alpha! Just given it a go and
       | it seems to work really well.
       | 
       | I'm totally novice but being able to tinker with Blender on my
       | laptop without it burning up is going to be amazing!
        
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       (page generated 2021-05-07 23:01 UTC)