Re:Blender 2.92
by danShumway on Saturday February 27, 2021 @12:59PM
(#26286671)
> If the companies sponsoring Blender, many of which already customers from the commercial days, withdraw their support tomorrow, in a couple of years Blender will turn into another Gimp, as everyone switch to something else to pay their bills.
And if the companies buying Slack suddenly stop buying Slack, it will also die. The observation that all software development requires an investment of resources is not a FLOSS-specific observation, and it's not particularly relevant to the conversation about whether FLOSS software is regularly competitive with proprietary alternatives.
It's not really an insight to say that if you starve developers they'll stop developing. We all know that already. And it's also true of every commercial product. When a community switches to another product, the original product withers because it lacks support. That is a correct observation, but what does that have to do with FLOSS? That's just a general principle that applies to everyone.
I don't see you arguing that Slack doesn't count as a competitive product because most of its individual users and small communities use the free version, and some day the big corporations it relies on for the bulk of its revenue might switch to Matrix/Element instead.
> many of which already customers from the commercial days
This is also just not true. Blender's current funding exists because they put in the work to get completely new grants and investments from major game studios like Epic, Ubisoft, Steam, and Microsoft, as well as from hardware manufacturers like NVidia and AMD. Blender's funding has solidly increased from its early days.
Blender is not just sailing on its previous commercial support from its previous commercial days. It didn't get grants in those days, companies generally don't give massive no-strings-attached grants to commercial products. Modern-day Blender has greatly expanded the support it has because the people managing its funding/organization are very smart and have put a metric ton of work into understanding and innovating on existing Open Source PR and community management models.
This is part of why Open Source maintainers and organizers should be paying so much attention to what Blender does, because it is genuinely doing an excellent job selling the idea of a community-supported Open Source standard to large companies.
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Stepping outside of the conversation, just to reiterate one more time: the fact that FLOSS tools are regularly competitive despite receiving on average much less support than their proprietary alternatives is a sign that there is something very cost-efficient about the FLOSS development model, and that pumping more funding into it might be a better use of resources than buying commercial products.
You can argue all you want that Open Source is not sustainable, but there are still a lot of Open Source projects that are of competitive levels of quality compared to their proprietary alternatives.
Could the funding situation be better? Yes. Does the funding situation mean that those projects somehow don't exist, or that they're not currently of comparable quality to their commercial alternatives? No.
And if the companies buying Slack suddenly stop buying Slack, it will also die. The observation that all software development requires an investment of resources is not a FLOSS-specific observation, and it's not particularly relevant to the conversation about whether FLOSS software is regularly competitive with proprietary alternatives.
It's not really an insight to say that if you starve developers they'll stop developing. We all know that already. And it's also true of every commercial product. When a community switches to another product, the original product withers because it lacks support. That is a correct observation, but what does that have to do with FLOSS? That's just a general principle that applies to everyone.
I don't see you arguing that Slack doesn't count as a competitive product because most of its individual users and small communities use the free version, and some day the big corporations it relies on for the bulk of its revenue might switch to Matrix/Element instead.
> many of which already customers from the commercial days
This is also just not true. Blender's current funding exists because they put in the work to get completely new grants and investments from major game studios like Epic, Ubisoft, Steam, and Microsoft, as well as from hardware manufacturers like NVidia and AMD. Blender's funding has solidly increased from its early days.
Blender is not just sailing on its previous commercial support from its previous commercial days. It didn't get grants in those days, companies generally don't give massive no-strings-attached grants to commercial products. Modern-day Blender has greatly expanded the support it has because the people managing its funding/organization are very smart and have put a metric ton of work into understanding and innovating on existing Open Source PR and community management models.
This is part of why Open Source maintainers and organizers should be paying so much attention to what Blender does, because it is genuinely doing an excellent job selling the idea of a community-supported Open Source standard to large companies.
----
Stepping outside of the conversation, just to reiterate one more time: the fact that FLOSS tools are regularly competitive despite receiving on average much less support than their proprietary alternatives is a sign that there is something very cost-efficient about the FLOSS development model, and that pumping more funding into it might be a better use of resources than buying commercial products.
You can argue all you want that Open Source is not sustainable, but there are still a lot of Open Source projects that are of competitive levels of quality compared to their proprietary alternatives.
Could the funding situation be better? Yes. Does the funding situation mean that those projects somehow don't exist, or that they're not currently of comparable quality to their commercial alternatives? No.