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@instinct-vfx: https://code.blender.org/2022/02/vfx-reference-platform/
Blender Developers Blog: VFX Reference Platform — Blender Developers Blog
@Nick_Anderson: Whoa
Good and bad. Python updates will be nice
@bob.w: I am, honestly unsurprised
@instinct-vfx: Yeah me neither. And it’s sad i am to some degree
@bob.w: Honestly, I’m glad their being clear about it.
@instinct-vfx: Yeah that’s better of course. I would still like to see Blender to be more open about people willing to adopt it in the different industries. But Ton has made it pretty clear time and time again how he perceives people needing to earn money aside from donations 
@Nick_Anderson: It has potential to be an amazing DCC but to date they have not embraced the business and production aspect. Which I get cause that could turn them into an Adobe or Autodesk very quickly. Part of the reason they’ve made so much progress is because of their no pressure r&d approach.
No one is getting fired over this. And that’s awesome
@instinct-vfx: But that also sometimes shifts the focus to “interesting” things rather than fixing “important” issues. Global undo being broken for years being an example, or performance issues with production grade scenes. Not being able to write plugins and hence having to maintain a full fork just for the sake of adding performance critical custom code is another one.
I am aware that this is pretty much impossible to solve, but it is still a sad shame to me
@Nick_Anderson: For sure I agree. That’s why some pressure is good I would say. Helps eliminate those problems. But blender doesn’t have that pressure so here we are. Im interested what will happen at companies that have already invested in blender production environment. Like Ubisoft. I imagine locking the current version in forever isn’t an option.
@instinct-vfx: Nick Porcino just brought up a very important point that also has him (and now that he brought it up myself) a tad disgruntled
It will help adopting Blender in a big studio environment.
It will facilitate the industry to contribute to Blender.
During the past two years there was little evidence of any of those outcomes.
SOMEONE I think the issue is…Blender leadership are opposed to studio integration, and don’t understand the needs of a studio
@Shea: It’s just another thing to make blender a pain in the arse. Now when our artists want to update to new versions we will have to migrate code bases across so many unnecessary python versions.
Two years is no where near enough time to see the actual effect of their initial decision.
@instinct-vfx: Quoting Nick:
> Again, I don’t mean to offend, but that statement is disingenuous considering their significant dependency on projects we, here, built as a community.
>
> https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/B/browse/master/build_files/build_environment/cmake/versions.cmake
>
> Like, all of our projects are listed there.
>
> [11:30 PM] It’s one thing for them to disengage from a commitment to the platform, it’s another to imply we’re not giving back to the committee. It’s got me a bit rankled, obviously.
SOMEONE so sticking to the platform was just a fig leaf half heartedly raised
@instinct-vfx: Blender is building on a LOT of huge vfx industry OSS projects
@bob.w: Truth
@instinct-vfx: To claim the industry would not contribute is at least ignorant
@Shea: Yeah, that read like a bunch of BS - they want new shinnies as it builds hype
SOMEONE Also 2 years is not much time…
@bob.w: Yeah not on the scale of our projects anyway
Shit I’ve not even had the time yet to figure out what kind of license encumbrance I’d have to deal with when sharing tools with outsourcers
@theodox: Unfortunately, I’ve found that GPL fandom often correlates with unprocessed hostility towards people who need to make things for a living. It does not have to work that way – but it happens often enough that I treat it as a warning sign. It often manifests in things other than software licensing.
And yeah – it’s hard enough to draw up a good working relationship with a legal entity half way around the world that lets you share tools without worrying that they can clone your content and sell it under their own name. Adding a bunch of wrangling thanks to your modeling package of choice is not a welcome addition.
@passerby: its a pretty strange fandom
a lot of GPL stuff gets into this whole thing where you can’t tell where if its more concerned with pushing GPL, or with solving a problem
@bob.w: The GPL is a direct manifestation of the libre-software movement, which is as much a political movement as it is a software development ideal. Its honestly why Open Source exists, which is the way more business friendly version of the same general idea
@instinct-vfx: I just read some of the discussion on bf-committers. That is partly painful to watch honestly.
>
> Blender runs on an operating system stated by the VFX Reference Platform,
> but the exact library versions are not followed.
That. Is. The. Whole. Point. Quoting from the vfxplatform website:
> All versions should be considered exact required versions, except for those components where indicates that:
> • for systems (or software) providing the library at runtime, versions should be considered minimum version required.
> • otherwise, for software building software against the library, versions should be considered highest version allowed
>
That’s basically saying
> We follow the vfx reference platform but we don’t
@bob.w: I’d not be surprised if it wasn’t just “We want to upgrade python whenever and don’t want to justify ourselves”
Now, let me come up with other reasons to make my point!
@passerby: pretty much isnt blender dev on a macro level more or less what ton says goes
@bob.w: Which, yeah, if I could upgrade python whenever I wanted I’d probably do that.
@passerby: and on a micro level what ever that dev wanted to do
@bob.w: I mean yeah, that’s open development in a nutshell. I don’t know how BDFL their process is, but I’d assume they’ve got people who have veto power over certain areas
SOMEONE There’s about 3-5 core Blender devs who run their respective domains
but they get strongest veto rights
@bob.w: Makes sense, and I can remember when they first bumped the python version after “adopting the reference platform”, how annoyed they were about having to justify it. It certainly fixed the bug they were hitting, but from what I remember there was an available backport, it just meant they’d have to apply patches to their local build instead of just tracking latest
Which, its not my toy, they can play with it out how they want, but it certainly made it harder for us to consider working with it
@instinct-vfx: It pretty much puts all of that risk on my turf while telling me it is in my best interest
@bob.w: I mean, we’re so lumberingly slow that our local version of python has fallen off the face of the earth (turns out 3.5 wasn’t very popular, probably because it still doesn’t have fstrings)
@instinct-vfx: Okay. Now i am angry. I am going to stop before i go on a rant tangent, but i am still gonna leave that here. The same person i quoted above also said this on a ticket in regards to outdated (and vulnerable) SSL versions:
https://i.imgur.com/rH0bgkU.png
1225x180px image
So “we want to update python ASAP or better as we please” but we do not update libraries for vulnerable patch releases because that is far to dangerous.
@bob.w: I mean, OpenSSL is a nightmare to update, so I’d be grabbing at any straws to avoid that again 
@instinct-vfx: Yep. But vulnerable applications in the cloud or even just corporate network is a nightmare you never want to live through.
@bob.w: But, yeah this is very much just them reaffirming their commitment to doing what they want to do without anyone getting on their case
> Yep. But vulnerable applications in the cloud or even just corporate network is a nightmare you never want to live through.
Fact, which is why I did it last time
@instinct-vfx: I agree it is a nightmare. But hey, so is integrating Blender when it does not stick to vfxplatform 
@passerby: well its this, or sticking with something autodesk owned
or maxon
@bob.w: Autodesk is annoying but consistent about it
@instinct-vfx: The problem is, that blender - BY FAR - does not solve all our 3D challenges, so we need both. If we could stick with either/or (as in both) we may have a path to shift more and more workloads to blender. As it stands - as much as i would like to - my recommendation would be “only in very rare cases”. I hate them for being so stubborn about some of this not because i hate blender but because i would love to integrate it but can’t for purely ideological reasons 
@bob.w: Yeah. I mean, I can’t even pry motion builder from the cold dead hands of my animators.
@instinct-vfx: Even if it would scratch all itches i never want to go “all in” again. I want to be as application agnostic as i can. If i need to rip out XSi? Sure. Autodesk axes product XYZ? Welp, that’s stupid, but hey we can replace that. Animator ABC prefers Maya? So be it, as long as we can write a publishing adaptor, go for it.
@bob.w: That’s the dream
@instinct-vfx: We have come a long way in recent years. We’re not there. But every single bit of data we move over feels like it somewhat counters the hours of lifetime i loose over grieves with all vendors be it commercial or GPL . To some extent