My 2c:
I am looking to get out of my current Nuke workflow, mostly because of the licencing. I would support Natron via Patreon with a small monthly fee, if it helps. It would be great to still have an OS alternative to Nuke for both fun and profit. I don’t know of the details but having it maintained by the Blender foundation doesn’t sound a bad idea!
@devernay a patron is setup would donations help you spend more time on natron?
If so, please setup a patron! Eventhough i have never used natron i would be willing to donate monthly to help support developement instead of natron dying a slow death
Blender compositing is also node based as im sure you know.
I dont really see how (for example) swapping out blenders compositor with natron would change either blender or natrons nature that much.
Ofcourse i dont really see that happening, blenders compositor needs love for sure, but it also doesnt have really active developers atm. (Opensource compositor curse?) Blender does however have funds to support a fulltime developer…
If these numbers here are real: http://www.somsubhra.com/github-release-stats/?username=NatronGitHub&repository=Natron
Natron was downloaded 30’000 times.
Plus taking other resources like the Natron Inria Youtube channel with 782 subscribers and other Youtube channels featuring Natron tutorials.
I might be naive, but if we can motivate 1% of all these people downloaded Natron, around 300 people, to donate 20.-- every month (thats what you would pay for a single Adobe product) we could raise 6’000.-- a month.
Could be a starting point to attract existing and new developers to work on the project.
With its own unique workflow. As I said, a big appeal of Natron is that it resembles Nuke quite a lot.
The suggestion to limit Natron to just 2D so that Natron could be integrated with Blender would render Natron as a standalone app essentially useless. If there is any aim at keeping Natron alive at all it should be to continue development and growth of Natron as a standalone app which would include one day its own 3D workspace. That’s what the majority of Natron supporters are hoping for.
By the way, I support your idea of a patron. 
I would support any kind of fund raising if the aim is to put Natron back on track of growth and development as its own app.
Unfortunately, averaging monthly donation doesn’t work in the real life. My educated guess is that getting 300 people to pay 20 euro a month will be some serious example of black magic at work.
If you can get 300 people to donate, 80% will be paying 2 to 5 euro, 15% smth like 10 euro, and then the last 5% will pay 20 or more a month. That’s a good start, but not quite viable in the long run. And getting to even those 300 will take time.
I’ve yet to see someone in the free/libre software development to make a living off Patreon.
Blender partially relies on Blender Cloud subscriptions and store sales for its income. Krita sells its version on Windows Store and Steam and also has a store for selling courses. Neither would manage to get by just off donations. And they’ve been a lot longer around, with much larger following.
Above all, this project would need a team, where different people would take care of things they are most qualified to do. I’m sure the community has people who can do marketing and training. But right now there isn’t even an active developer maintaining Natron, and without at least one developer it all falls apart. (Which is pretty much the reason I asked Alexandre and Fred about ‘low-hanging fruit’ tasks to pick for someone to start getting involved, when I interviewed them.)
Sorry, if I’m overly pessimistic.
Could we also sell Natron in Windows store and Steam as well?
It’s definitely an option that should be considered most seriously. Boud pointed out a while ago that Windows Store brings 4000 to 6000 euro monthly to Krita. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/93cal5/krita_in_the_windows_store_an_update/e3cdr21/
Mind you, that wouldn’t happen to Natron immediately, as all things take time. And, again, you need to put that money into further development. If there is no developer, selling Natron would be just ripping people off.
Simple snap package where you bundle in all the dependencies would solve that problem for good.
Has anyone considered getting in contact with Academy Software Foundation to help fund the development or contribute some other way in the development of Natron?
They claim to be the go-to guys to help with situations such as this one:
Shouldn’t we put them to the test?
There is actually a flatpak of natron available now.
…and the official linux package (which is not flatpak) also includes all dependencies.
The good news is that there is still an active maintainer for the flatpak distrib, so he can upgrade dependencies whenever there is a security issue.
Natron should not use the system libraries, because it also depends on a patched Qt4 (with better threading control) and on an imagemagick library compiled with 16 bits HDR support, among others. All details can be found in the flatpak GitHub - flathub/fr.natron.Natron , or in our script that builds all dependencies (including GCC itself) Natron/build-Linux-sdk.sh at master · NatronGitHub/Natron · GitHub
I just realized its not that hard to place a bounty for solving an issue.
Just login on bountysource, set an amount for the issue you would like to have solved, enter your paypal or crypto details, and boom… its done.
I think the two biggest problems in FOSS are:
Many users would not even thinking about paying something for the great tools they are using for free all year long (missing education, lack of intellect).
A lot of FOSS projects have no simple clear button which you can click to donate.
For example FreeCAD has a terrible donation program…
(I’d like to do one time payments after done some work with the tool).
Not sure if bountysource is a popular for crowdfunding cause not a lot people know it… However what about of patreon ? it can make more sense from that ?
I would like to contribute to natron by coding and i am developer by learning, i know C++, C and Python just i need more practice to make real. For limited time i have a lot several project too (open source).
Natron needs for more interesting are to recruit some coder who make more features and need to be organized to build a strong team, without them it is useless thought.
What do you think ?
I just noticed that Unity got Visual effect graph which is node based particle editor. I think it would be great if Natron would get this feature.
There is a presetation about GPU emitter graph system for Frostbite engine. Maybe somebody could implement this in Natron’s 3D workspace.
Or something like After effects has?
This looks all good and nice, to be able to implement things to Natron, we need links to opensource tools doing such things…
Hi! I’m new with Natron, I found it thanks to TJFree and Alexandra Ostasheva (YT users).
Maybe those who are experienced could submit thier tutorials, test or previews to Youtube, that’s a good way to bring the attention of new users (and devs).
On the other hand, I’m part of a platform that incentivize high quality contributions to open source projects. In short, the Natron’s team could post about a new Pull request or the announcement of a new feature or could ask for help and we reward the user who complete the task. Tasks like code update, plugins, documentation update, the translation of the documentation (or the software itself), tutorials, visibility (spread the word), etc.
Of course, this won’t solve the problem of funding. But at least it’s something.
I will share this in our Discord server, hopefully some dev is interested.
This is our site https://join.utopian.io/ and this our blog @utopian-io
Also, a Natron Discord server would we great. I can create it and moderate it if you want.
PS: sorry if there are grammar mistakes, English isn’t my native language.
@ KristijanZic: Did you contact the Academy Software Foundation already ?
Would be interessting to know what they say, since they have propiretary partners like The Foundry…
Where are most users who love and support Natron ? It needs desperate publicity…
Blendernation ? Linuxtoday? Linuxfr ? etc…