Built in addons are gone for us for ever
Hi, we live in a country which blender website and services are blocked by government, the idea of removal of built in addons isn't gonna work for us since we can't access blender services, we can either download executable programs from our domestic websites or do nothing .
beside that we have learned in the past that blender website and services could go down and inaccessible, as far as i remember blender was a local and offline software not a cloud service such as apple and microsoft and autodesk, please do not make blender apple alike, rest of the world hate those companies,
who ever idea was to transform blender into apple, he must've not be friendly to the users and artists whom using blender.
10 Comments
I get your frustration, and there's definitely an issue here that the BF perhaps did not see coming or could consider providing direct solutions.
But antagonizing the BF, and comparing them to shady practices we see in proprietary business. That's quite a far stretch, don't you think? We are talking about the Blender Foundation , an independent public benefit organization developing a forever Free and Open Source software .
You can share a problem and ask for solutions without insulting people. That has the added benefit of usually giving results, respect and trust, trivial things like that.
Let's imagine the Blender Foundation turned into Apple as you call it:
Blender is free and open source, it isn't owned by any company or personality. Anybody can just publish Blender anywhere. That's why you can download Blender from outside Blender.org or any of their provided access, as you just pointed out. That's why Bforartists or UPBGE exits and are not being hunted down by corporations and lawsuits. Welcome to the beauty of FOSS where anyone can contribute and even republish and nobody can take things away from the people. Among other things.
With or without the extensions platform, integrated or not, you still have to download something at some point from either blender.org or a 3rd party website. If your only solution, so far, was always a 3rd party website, then why don't you address your request there? Nothing prevents them from bundling addons or making their own extensions platform.
Besides, many addons on the extension platform have been and still are available on other places, most addons are not from the BF to begin with. And external addons developers often purposefully publish their addons on multiple platforms not only to give people options that suit their taste but also to suit people who might not be able to use every platform.
Or you could do what every other person does in that situation and use a VPN. it's not a blender responsibility to maintain different countries access to their site / software, that would be a monumental ask. That's up to the countries discretion and its people's ability to work around it. there is plenty of free vpns, you can download the plugins using that then turn it off.
Just download addons with blender with same internet that you downloaded blender. Nothing changed in that matter.
We can only download software executable from our domestic websites or use illegal ( in our country ) tor browser which is dangerous And what if blender servers goes down ? What if i dont what give online access to blender ? Or i cant in my situation
You already somehow download Blender and distribute it locally in Your country. Do the same for extensions. Download them and distribute them as zips.
Nothing changed in that regard.
in future when they cut the access and force us to download through blender only we'd be screwed, what next ? they're gonna make blender a cloud service ?
I understand you're a bit worried from experience of being blocked access to content, but this is different, it's open source, it's Blender.
For example, we do not use GitHub, we host our own system which is a pain in the ass to maintain but it gives us the advantage of being independent. Last year I was in China teaching at a University in Beijing, and there I couldn't access GitHub or YouTube, but I was happy to see I could access projects.blender.org and video.blender.org because of this work we put to keep ourselves independent.
Blender is made by the community, sure organized by the Blender Foundation but everything we do is public, open source, and documented for it to be available forever or as long as possible.
Blender 4.2 LTS added support for portable installations making it easier to carry Blender with you completely offline on a USB stick.
Also correct me if i'm wrong @pablovazquez, extension platform server is also avaliable and moderately easy* to set up.
rightclickselect, blender.org , stackexchange, reddit, twitter, these are the links that either are blocked by our government or eu sanctions, were screwed cause were not living in EU or US thats it i get it !
Setting up your own extensions repository is easy, there's documentation on how to do it docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/advanced/extensions/creating_repository/static_repository.html
If it's not clear you can ask on DevTalk or Blender Chat.