Re:Unleashing Open-Source Silicon
by slimsag on Monday November 25, 2019 @08:29PM
(#21634871)
Your Blender example doesn't really hold up in this case because it's not like Blender has been funded historically by some large company replacing the expensive proprietary tool Maya. In fact, there are many fully open source products that do not fit into some larger corporate-backed business model: VLC, Gimp, ffmpeg, to name just a few.
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But Blender specifically has been proprietary for many years, before being crowdfunded into an open-source project.
It’s an imperfect example, but the Maya to Blender transition is starting to happen now. See “Epic Games supports Blender Foundation with $1.2 million Epic MegaGrant“, https://www.blender.org/press/epic-games-supports-blender-fo...
I would love to see Blender become competitive with Maya etc but it's got a long long way to go. Though it might be closer than most, in part because it's competition is so expensive people are looking for alternatives. I sponsor Blender to help see that day happen and I wish big companies that are paying for Maya, Houdini, 3DSMax, ZBrush licenses would instead spend all that money paying engineers to contribute to Blender. But, as of today, while 2.8 made big strides, it's still missing huge swaths of features available in Maya and others.