For example, USAID was a projection of US soft power, a much more explicit way to "dominate the world" than any company donating to an open source project.

Would you suggest that DOGE did a net-good thing in the world by destroying it, because the people who were receiving its help are now dying rather than morally compromised?

I didn't mean to come across like anything you were saying was invalid, and I think it's not-nothing to speak up now even if I think it's a bad trade of psychic energy for most folks (*especially* those who are not members of the community or intending to become one)

(FWIW, I also view software dev as creative labor, and PSF's coziness with genAI companies as being similarly bad.)

Because the threat is *always* there

HOWEVER

if there were an indication here that Blender were bending their "we'll take your money and do whatever we want with it" policy, I might feel more activated to make a fuss.

It's NEVER OK to accept gifts of any kind from groups of people who want to essentially dominate the world.

Even if they are foolish and wrong and their ambition never comes to fruition and it's just "free money", knowingly and consciously accepting gifts from people you know are causing great harm in the world taints you, irreparably.

That said, I don't think that my failure to get involved with Blender in particular invalidates my criticism?

it *feels* more open-and-shut to me than the pretty-direct analogue where the PSF accepted a donation from Anthropic in January (even if thinking about it, the act of theft feels very comparable, which… I should unpack that some more)

In the context of Blender accepting money from Anthropic specifically, a lot of what bothers me and seems to resonate for other people too is that Blender is framing all this as being so excited to partner with Anthropic, and the implication that Blender agrees with Anthropic's self-description as "reliable" and amazing and blah blah

And *that* kind of thing—how an org interacts with sponsors, how partnerships are announced—is the kind of rolling org policy that gets changed by other means.

I think it's important to criticize them for that, and to make those critiques visible to the foundation that made that decision.

In an ideal world, charities would be illegal and we would fund these things publicly, with the source of the money (taxes on ppl with too much) completely divorced from decisions about how to spend it (made by genuinely democratic processes).

I'll start off by saying that no, no one should harass over this (batman snapping gun dot jay pee gee). That said, Blender is definitely looking for tacit approval here, and I don't think silence is an appropriate response to that approval-seeking.