Jason van Gumster

2391 points
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Atlanta, GA

Jason van Gumster mostly makes stuff up. He writes, animates, and occasionally teaches, all using open source tools. He's run a small, independent animation studio, wrote Blender For Dummies and GIMP Bible, and continues to blurt out his experiences during a [sometimes] weekly podcast, the Open Source Creative Podcast. Adventures (and lies) at @monsterjavaguns.

Authored Comments

Hooray! Glad to see another creative posting their story here! Thanks so much for sharing.

I guess that's the difference. I don't see it as "so little progress". Sure the other open movie projects saw the birth of big new features. But most of those features didn't get polish and refinement until after the project... and informed by the experience. Again, this is exactly how Cycles got its start. Not to mention all the little fixes and time-savers that got added in the course of the production.

Note also that there *already* is a way for people to contribute to Blender development outside of the open projects. That's the Blender Development Fund. It's still there and going steady. And the fact that Blender Cloud subscriptions have been increasing rather than decreasing tends to indicate that there's a good chunk of the user base who are actually pleased with the direction the BI and BF are headed.