fryrender

[Big Fan]

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[afecelis]

yeah that avatar is distracting...especially when you get a few on a page...
I hope he doesn't animate you know Shocked Embarassed Wink

hehehe, my wife shall pay for the consequences!!! Today is our 5th anniversary!!!!

oh! Ok, I get it. More a la "Sun Microsystems", and the GNU philosophy way; where you can still offer your product for free but have the right to offer commercial support for it

well, that sure is something where Ono would make some good bucks since he's so good at it! And I totally agree; it's his creation and he deserves to make a living out of it.

Thanks big fan for the enlightenment

[Maluminas]

I sure hope Indigo stays freeware and for all we know it will, Ono has never talked about making it commercial. But whatever he decides i will most likely follow him. If Indigo goes commercial i will support him (unless it becomes over-priced like so many renderers, sadly) just because he had the guts to do it alone and the generosity to offer his work freely and the kindness to listen to his fans ^_^

I would like it if you cleared this tangle Ono, tell us what are your plans for the future.

I think i never thanked you for this awesome gift, so thank you

/bow to Master Ono

[Big Fan]

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[Koba]

I would hate to see Ono do the way the author of Toxic. In that instance, the sole author was bought out by a big CG company and his contract forced him to stop working on the project (which was open source).

Ono can make money in the following ways.

- Develop indigo so more and more "high powered" individuals/enterprises use it. Then provide support to them at a fee.

- He could prioritise new features for paying individuals/organisations (as long as indigo with these new features remain available to all).

- If he has the resources to invest, he could create a 24 hour render farm running indigo. People would be willing to pay for such a service.

- Create a donation page as I am sure loads of us would be willing to show our support!

There are honest, ethical models of making money with free/open software. With his great work, Ono earns our respect, gratitude and recognition. That too is important.

Of course, for any of this to work, indigo really needs to catch on! It is developing at such a rate that I think all the above models will soon become viable.

Ono certainly deserves to make something out of his hard work but there are better ways than just charging for copies of indigo! Anyway, I remember him once stating that indigo would always be free.

Koba

[filippo]

tomorrow I will test Indigo in my render farm , after, I post the result..................fryrender...it will die
filippo

[Big Fan]

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[afecelis]

you know what they say; "one door closes, ten more open"

I also like Koba's approach. I'm sure there's more than one way Ono can make $$$ out of indie-go!, hehehe, sorry, Indigo, without sacrificing its free spirit

ps. and yup, many of us would be interested in donating.

[Big Fan]

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[afecelis]

mmmm..... Now that you mention it, a blend2Indigo version would be interesting (like blend2pov or blend2kt), where you can pick Indigo as another of the internal renderers (like yafray). Total integration! Hitting the "render" button would collapse all the geometry into mesh, export to xml and invoke Indigo. I wonder why they haven't done it yet

as of raising funds a la blender foundation, I don´t think Nick likes the idea very much.

[m1j]

I like the way NVidia handle Gelato. Free for small business and individual but priced reasoanable for bigger companies. Indigo could take this model very easy. Indigo in an embeded form would also have a cost. This would allow big software companies to selecet indigo as an embeded rendering engine. The rest of us individuals and small business would still be able to leverage indigo against the big componies.

[IanT]

Being both the author of an MLT renderer and an ex management consultant, this is an intriguing thread.

I definitely agree that the money is to be made from larger organisations and unlikely to be made from hobbyists or individual professional artists, but the big question is what model to follow?

Charging for support would work, but fee-paying customers might object to having their hard-earned bug-fixes or enhancements released to the free community. Would that mean two separate code-trees? Ouch, as a programmer this would give me nightmares. Once a renderer is working, it tends to stay working, unlike, for example, a complex business application, whose code paths are not all equally explored during normal use. Also, if I paid $500-1000 for a product, I would expect all "features" that are clearly bugs to be fixed for free.

If support comes from helping users use it, surely that would come from existing user experience and enabled via the joy of the Internet?

In which case, the big support money will come from enhancement requests (additional BSDFs, exporters, GUI features, GI baking, animation/walkthrough support etc.). If this is the case, again, how many companies who've paid for this functionality would want it released to anyone else, especially if they're not paying for it? How on earth could this be managed without a very disciplined and robust change-control strategy or a performance-friendly plugin architecture that I assume Indigo currently lacks?

Ian.

[Zom-B]

Create a donation page as I am sure loads of us would be willing to show our support!

I totally agree in this point... some of use do (or will) earn money, powered by indigo!
I'm shure everybody could spend some $$$ for Nick's great work!!!

Perhaps he could buy a new rig, so his example renderings wouldn't be this noisy, and a new NV 8800 could motivate him to code some support for GP rendering...

[eman7613]

Perhaps he could buy a new rig, so his example renderings wouldn't be this noisy, and a new NV 8800 could motivate him to code some support for GP rendering...

Or get lost in BattelFeild ;p