[Poll] $300 donation to an open-source project. Now with poll!

Hi all,

This year, at my company's Christmas party I won $300 to donate to an open-source project of my choosing. At the moment I still haven't made my mind and I'm looking for suggestions.

Do you know or have any open-source project, ideally related to gaming, Unity or not, that would benefit from this donation?

Please let me know! Cheers.

[EDIT]

Added a poll to get a definitive answer! It's hard to give money!

Still accepting suggestions though!

 

In the last year I not see many special new gamedev open source projects then I recomend you buy dog and cat food and visit with your company friends a near animal shelter and enjoy helping the most in need, good luck.

 

Game/Rendering related I would pick:
- Blender
- Blendswap
- Ogre3D
- Assimp
- jMonkeyEngine

Need more?

 

There is always Blender, MakeHuman, Gimp, Krita if you feel like it.
Especially, Blender is kind of related to Unity. They're trying to solve their .fbx workflow in recent builds.
A though decision to make...good luck!

 

How about Godot?

godotengine.org

 

Thanks for the great suggestions guys, please keep them coming!

 

The Blender foundation would be my top pick. Mozilla and FreeBSD are also worth supporting.

 

I would also pick Blender if I would have to pick something.

 

I agree with Blender. It is probably one of the most deserving products. It is also usable for many things all over the industry, including in conjunction with Unity. I'd say it is probably the one that is most far-reaching into the industry, and on top of that one of the deserving considering the work that goes into it.

 

what about UMA ?

 

Thanks guys. Looks like Blender is on the lead.

@Damien Delmarle What's UMA?

 

OOOOOOO, Donate to me!!!!! I be extremely GRATEFUL!

LOL JK.

Congratz on the win though!

 

Maybe you like my TPS free solution http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/tpsa-third-person-aim-system-free.287991/
I'll be selling the contents but for now the main Aim scripts are free.

 

Free is not open source. Especially if you plan on selling copies in the future.

Now, for $300 I bet you could convince somebody to do a relatively small, open source asset for Unity. Could be fun to see if you could get a promising asset made into an open source project.

Or you could just give it to me. I have an open source project...in my pants! Booyah! Up top! Anybody? No? Okay.

 

see here: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/uma-unity-multipurpose-avatar-on-the-asset-store.219175/

and agree that its maybe more interesting to target smaller, if you want to have direct impact

 

Are you open source?
Let me know where I can download your source so I can edit you.

 

Lots of great suggestions coming in. Thanks!

Like some of you said, I'd prefer to give it to a smaller organization so it would have more impact, but I'm open to all suggestions for now.

Keep them coming!

 

I would suggest signing up to the Blender Cloud, as not only will you be donating to the Blender Foundation, you will get all the training/resources it provides for several years....win/win

 

UMA is MIT license. They are not organized as a non-profit. If you're interesting in impact on a small organization talk to one of the 3 UMA folks that have done the work: Fernando, Joen, or Eli in the thread posted earlier.

Excluding UMA (not working on it now till it's warmer and am not Fernando, Joen, or Eli): I'd pick in order of preference Blender, GIMP, Krita but any one of those three guys above are deserving and capable. UMA can eventually make a big impact on Unity and dare I say it, UE4.

 

This is not Unity related, but I've always been a fan of FlashDevelop, which has grown immensely since its beginnings years ago and is run by only two guys, so definitely a small organization. Who knows, maybe they'll make an alternative IDE to MonoDevelop sooner or later

 

Blender.

 

There is one. It's called Visual Studio.

 

Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't think would qualify as a donation.

Haha! Thanks but I'll pass on that one

I've been a big user of FlashDevelop back in the days of Flash, but now I honestly think it's not worth it. Although they also support Haxe I'd rather go to something more gaming related.

 

Do a contest. Have people make assets, give your favorite $300 when they go open source.

 

Already plenty of assets on the store that would qualify for that.
But hey - I suppose it would be a pretty sweet way to get a bunch of free assets.

 

thats a good idea of event that unity should run with a prize like win a unity pro licence there will be more open source projects

 

I'd rather give the money to someone who's been in the open source "business" for a while. Besides, doing a contest for $300 wouldn't probably attract that many valuable projects. But thanks for the suggestion anyhow!

 

I'd like to second for Krita. Sketchbook needs the comp and Krita is so promising despite being so young.

 

Haven't heard about Krita before, thanks for mentioning it. It does look very promising!

 

I didn't know about Krita either. Nice!

 

I'd say Gimp. Blender and Gimp are probably the most "relevant" OSS applications for Unity users. Blender seems to be doing fantastic, while Gimp...well, I don't even remember how long I am waiting for 2.10 already. But it's been years; I can tell you that.

In its current form, Gimp is completely unsuitable for any kind of heightmap (terrain) work, because of the lack of high bit depth support. 2.10 is supposed to give us just that.

So yeah, Gimp as they seemingly need the money more at the moment.

Other projects, I feel deserve it would be Krita, Darktable and Inkscape. (Darktable is especially impressive from a development perspective)

 

godot is trying to be "Unity: open source", so it might be the most deserving of donations. Second place is definitely blender.

 

I doesn't matter if you signed up to the Blender Cloud or outright donated $300 to the Blender Foundation, as it goes to the exact same source, which in turn funds the development of Blender.

 

Now that I've thought it over...

It's an interesting idea to donate to an open source project. You donate to the development of a project that has an unknowable amount of persons working on it. There's the main devs, the known major contributors... and the anonymous collective making either small tweaks or producing python scripts for new / better functionality in blender.

 

i would say blender

 

Another voice for the Godot Engine here.

 

That's a really cool initiative!
Already added my vote!

 

Awesome idea!

 

Thats the way to go Luis! Great idea!

 

How much of that has to do with a potential lack of funding though? I'm hesitant to donate to a project if there is little in the way of updates.

My choice of Blender is based on how expensive a commercial equivalent would be. A good commercial modelling tool is considerably more expensive than an equivalent to GIMP.

 

GIMP is good but doesn't have to active support of Blender. $300 to GIMP doesn't do as much as $300 to Blender which is why I voted for Blender. Both GIMP & Blender are used by me although I can conceivable pay $60 for the Autodesk Sketching program or $100 for Adobe Photoshop Essentials. Paying $700 plus yearly upgrade fees for Maya LT isn't justifiable at my professional skill level.

 

Wow!
So many cool choices!
They all deserve the money.
I'd go with either Blender or Krita.
Blender would be my top choice.
But,..........this time, I'd say go with Krita!

Didn't know about Godot until I read this thread and saw the poll options. Lol!
Godot looks Cool!

 

I ended up voting for Krita, since it's smaller than Blender and 300$ might represent a more consistent sum to them.

About other suggestions, I thought about Sublime Text's Package Control. While Sublime is shareware and not free, Package Control is THE plugin every Sublime user uses, and it's open source and donation-based. Sounds like another valid contendant, and I see a lot of Unity users are starting to use Sublime too

 

Thanks for the input guys! Please keep voting!