Link: https://www.blender.org/press/anthropic-joins-the-blender-development-fund-as-corporate-patron/

In these uncertain and divisive times, we appreciate Anthropic offering support to the Blender project in the form of a Patron-level membership. This enables the Blender team to keep pursuing projects independently, and to focus on building tools for artists and creators.

Francesco Siddi, CEO at Blender

What do we make of this? Why this? Why now?

E: relevant blog post

https://gardinerbryant.com/the-blender-x-anthropic-thing-is-an-overreaction-but-also-not-at-all/

They probably will integrate blender somehow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic#U.S._military_and_intelligence

They did.

Best alternatives to blender on linux?

this seems like a bad thing to me given anthropic's track record and manifesto.

why?

Fork

And who's going to develop this fork?

Whoever wants to. Hasn't this been the FOSS signature forever? If you don't like where it's going fork it.

The reality is far more complicated than that. Maintaining a large project takes a lot of work in practice, and you can't just fork it and expect the fork to magically succeed. There are very few examples of such successful forks in the wild.

To add to this, when forks do succeed, it's typically because they're either making very few changes which can easily be reapplied to new versions of the original project, or because a significant number of the existing developers disagree with the project lead and are just doing what they were already doing before the fork, just without having to obey one specific person.

No, Blender the 3D software, not a blender.

😂

Exactly, taking over a large existing codebase is a herculean task. So, most forks just end up adding superficial changes on top and keeping upstream code as is.