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.)
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.
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:
“The mission of the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) is to increase the quality and quantity of contributions to the content creation industry’s open source software base; to provide a neutral forum to coordinate cross-project efforts; to provide a common build and test infrastructure; and to provide individuals and organizations a clear path to participation in advancing our open source ecosystem.”
…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.
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.
Omar and Thomas are also in the server, but they’re not online that much.
The link has been shared in the Facebook group and on the Natron Community website (https://natron.global/)
The server has been made and edited with the help of Fabrice and Omar so each role, category and channel is well thought of.
There is a decent to good amount of people in there (82 right now, it was about 110 but some left), but its not very active. I’ve only seen 3-4 people who’re active excluding me and Omar.
(P.S. when you join, mention that you got this link from this forum thread)
I think I shoulda made a post about the server on this forum but i was busy with some work and family issues so it always slipped my mind.
I also know Jerry Miller, so I’m gonna ask him to share the discord server invite in the Blender community server, there must be a lot of people using natron in that server.
But as I’ve seen for a couple of months, if no one’s active in the discord server, there’s no point in having one. Every now and then someone joins, immediately quits, i dont know why or from where they got the invite. One or two people are chatting. Most of them havent even logged in for over a month. A lot of them are yet to be assigned roles but they wont reply or come online. I’m just doing my job of moderating the server, helping fellow artists, etc.
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.
