[BeefySwain]

"Not only will Ubisoft help funding online support for Blender developers, Ubisoft Animation Studio – a department of Ubisoft Film and Television – will also use Blender for their productions and assign developers to contribute to Blender’s open source projects."

This seams like a really big deal. It's one thing to try to create a desert of profitability around yourself, which a lot of huge companies giving money to tangential FOSS projects could be construed as. It is quite another to have them commit to use the software internally.

Are there any other large multimedia companies that are known to primarily use FOSS media production programs?

[chriswwweb]

Yes it's a big deal, developers that submit code is probably worth more than the membership which is (only) €30K/year (if my research is correct: https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/), so those 30k will allow them to hire a dev halftime, as blender fund says that 30k are equivalent to "half year developer time".

Well it depends how much those developers will actually contribute, but it's still very good news.

But on the other hand they just got 1.2 million from Epic Games for 3 years ... to me this seems to be a much bigger contribution: https://www.blender.org/press/epic-games-supports-blender-fo...?

[hellofunk]

> For Corporate Patron (120k/year or more) membership please contact us directly.

I suspect Epic obviously fell into that category.