Blender is nonprofit and funded by donations and grants. The closest analog to this in the game engine space is Godot.

Blender is also managed exceptionally well for a FOSS project, systematically polishing up rough edges and paying close attention to the needs and desires of its userbase which no doubt inspires larger donations from more donors than FOSS projects usually have.

Their biggest marketplace (blendermarket) also directly contributes to the the Foundation as well.

It is incredible. Truly incredible. I know of no other FOSS project that comes close.

Aside from being OSS backed nonprofit, they also have a relatively small full time staff:

https://www.blender.org/about/people/

Blender is GPL2+. It's impossible to have that license and not be free. It's also basically impossible to change license.

Small nitpick: AIUI it is possible to sell binaries of a GPLv2 program, provided you keep providing source for free. (I think; IANAL, there's maybe some caveat about exactly when you have to give source and to who.) That can actually work if your users don't want to compile stuff themselves.

In theory. Show me one example (not service or support, but selling actual software). You have a better chance of winning a lottery, happens every day.

In theory, I can just walk through solid wall, using a quantum tunneling effect.

The closes thing you will find are things like blender release under GPL (i.e. pay me a money to release my commercial software under GPL, but that's not selling GPL software),

This whole line of thinking is disingenuous.

Simple mobile tools shows its definitely possible [0]. Simple gallery pro has 110k reviews, for example.

>You have a better chance of winning a lottery, happens every day.

Agreed here, though.

[0] https://www.simplemobiletools.com/