from Hacker News

Ben Fry resigns from the Processing Foundation

by eat_veggies on 10/4/23, 3:02 AM with 118 comments

  • by mellis on 10/4/23, 4:57 AM

    So very sad. Ben Fry is one of my heroes. He's done an amazing job with Processing, over a very long time. I can't think of any other open-source project with the same consistency of vision and quality of execution, plus the level of design and usability.

    I read a lot of Ben's code while I was working on the IDE for Arduino. It was always extremely clear, robust, and well-commented. And occasionally hilarious. My favorite part was the prompt to take a walk that showed up when you had created a new sketch for each letter of the alphabet on a particular day (sketch names defaulted to something like 20231003a, 20231003b, etc). But there were also some good digs at the failings of Processing's various dependencies, like Java and Mac OS.

    The world of computational design and open-source software is much better for having Ben Fry and Processing in it.

  • by ralusek on 10/4/23, 6:08 AM

    > It was a strange experience; I was soon shocked to learn that the Foundation spent nearly $800,000 last year. $0 of that went to Processing 4.

    > This year, the proposed Foundation budget is around $1.2 million. But for Processing, there is budget for just two people: one developer, one community lead.

    It's interesting, because I got very interested in Processing after being blown away by what an amazing asset Daniel Shiffman is for the coding/educational community, and wanting to find out more about it. When I went to go look into processing a bit more, I was very confused by what I encountered. It seemed like a radical political group with an absolute fixation on identity politics, which just happened to have a couple of programming platforms in the mix. Very sad to see that this wasn't just the superficial impression, but where the money is actually going.

    Shiffman, meanwhile, not only is an excellent engineer and communicator, pumping out an endless stream of content...sadly seems to have been doing so despite the organization. The man is a legitimate saint. The way that you get people interested in engineering is by making engineering fun and accessible, which is exactly what he does. I wish the best for him and the work that he does, and I hope that he gets to continue putting what he does out there with or without the help of processing. Processing and p5js, as well as their machine learning library ml5js, also deserve better; they're great too.

  • by keyle on 10/4/23, 4:43 AM

    This is sad. I was just thinking days ago, as I revisited Processing, how consistent it has been at being Processing. Sure, development has been rather slow but at least it's not overwhelming to come back to.

    I had no idea that they had a 'foundation' let alone this big. The list of people in the about section has me pondering 'why'.

    I never knew that a foundation based on donations could stray off the path so far as to make the original founders uncomfortable enough to quit.

    I wish them well and I hope that they start a new foundation where money can go instead. Money walks.

  • by acomjean on 10/4/23, 3:24 AM

    I like processing, and the “p5.js” variant. Schiffman’s coding train videos and “nature of code” (version 2 any day now) are how I learned of it and are really interesting and fun. https://github.com/nature-of-code

    I used p5.js to overlay some graphs on a photo I took which ended up in a coffee shop show.

    There is value to this and it seems a shame the foundation seems to be miss-managed. I’ve donated in the past and I’m going to have to look into it before doing so again.

  • by sberens on 10/4/23, 6:31 AM

    Here is the Processing Foundation's 2022 Funding Update:

    https://medium.com/processing-foundation/processing-foundati...

  • by didibus on 10/4/23, 6:06 AM

    The interesting part is:

    > I was soon shocked to learn that the Foundation spent nearly $800,000 last year. $0 of that went to Processing 4. [...] This year, the proposed Foundation budget is around $1.2 million. But for Processing, there is budget for just two people: one developer, one community lead.

    Basically he feels like the donation money should go towards further development of Processing itself, but the foundation seems to be spending it on other stuff, and not on continuing or accelerating the development of Processing itself.

  • by omneity on 10/4/23, 1:14 PM

    The only way to prevent a new crisis from happening is to create a second Foundation, safeguarding the initial objectives should the first Foundation veer off-course. But for that we need two Ben Frys.

  • by lacker on 10/4/23, 6:54 AM

    From the Processing Foundation website:

    https://processingfoundation.org/

    Every year, we support and sponsor programs that nurture diverse communities and their projects. Our programs include:

    A Fellowship and Teaching Fellowship Program that funds exploratory, creative, and technical research

    An Advocacy Program that partners with organizations for projects

    Public events that provide platforms for collaboration between our contributors, such as panels and talks that spread the word about the need for equity in these fields

    Summer programs to support emerging coders throughout the world

    Other bits:

    We invite you to meditate on digital fragmentation and infrastructure that lays its foundation through the global white capitalist, colonialist, and imperialist framework we live in today through our Land and Digital Acknowledgements.

    Please consider donating to the Processing Foundation to help us advance the role of programming within the visual arts.

    I guess the foundation money is mostly being spent on things unrelated to Processing itself. But, if this is what the people donating the money wanted to happen, who's to say that it's wrong? Or maybe nobody really knows what they wanted. It's a tough issue with nonprofit organizations because they can often just spend the money on whatever the management wants, which may not be what the donors or former management wants.

  • by sberens on 10/4/23, 3:48 AM

  • by gedy on 10/4/23, 5:16 AM

    I met Ben when he visited UCSB in 2004 or so to demo Processing. I was a dummy and thought my own visualization app was "better" and didn't pay much attention to him or talk with him after.

    I seriously admire his dedication to processing all these years, this must be tough!

  • by bondarchuk on 10/4/23, 7:29 AM

    So it seems like it was a mistake to let go of control of the foundation as one of the original founders? But if you have to (I see there were health reasons), doesn't a foundation have a charter, where one could put the intention that e.g. 50% of funds go directly to software development, or something?

  • by foota on 10/4/23, 3:29 AM

    So what is the foundation spending money on?

  • by throwoutway on 10/4/23, 11:50 AM

    This is sad. I loved Processing and Ben Fry's work. I hope the current board of the Processing Foundation can be ousted and that the donations wont be wasted away anymore. This is a sad state of affairs and I hope Ben can find new joy

  • by pjmlp on 10/4/23, 7:29 AM

    Yet another example how perverse foundations turn out to be, and FOSS isn't immune to such things.

  • by ogou on 10/4/23, 1:55 PM

    I've stopped all institutional donations. Never again in this political climate. Only specific projects, events, or Substack/Patreon support for individuals.

  • by mellosouls on 10/4/23, 3:56 AM

    It's not really clear from the thread what the complaint is though there is an implication of misspent or wasted funds.

    Looking at the About section, and the people involved [1] there appears to be at least a misalignment between the purely technical (?) vision of the tweet and the much wider remit of a foundation that he started years ago.

    Things change, priorities move on. Is there something rotten here as rather vaguely implied? Perhaps, but it's possible there is just a disappointment at the child choosing a very different path to that desired by the parent.

    [1] https://processingfoundation.org/people

  • by cameron_b on 10/4/23, 2:11 PM

    For those not logged in to twitter, Ben is also on a Mastodon instance

    https://information.garden/@benfry/111176713441913283

  • by Animats on 10/4/23, 3:53 AM

    This is Processing, as in the Arduino development environment? Or something else.

  • by whywhywhywhy on 10/4/23, 1:38 PM

    Heartbreaking news and sad some suspicions I had a while ago are being confirmed.

    Talent and technology based progress is no longer compatible with non-profits or academia.

    The actual technology, the actual tools made by actual talent that made coding easier and accessible have done a million times more for democratizing than any non-profit talk, grant or fellows program could ever do.

    The Foundation and it's farcical work can only exist with the Processing code base, but without the code the Foundation is nothing.

    Processing using since the Proce55ing days.

  • by k310 on 10/4/23, 3:42 AM

    Mere mortals can't see past the first "tweet" in a thread, so is there any more to Ben Fry's message?

    On edit, thanks for the nitter links!