Always support open source when you can, even if you use proprietary software instead of Blender.

Supporting open source creates competition for your paid alternative, so they're forced to give you a better product or a better deal.

Can you imagine if everyone paying monthly subscription for any type of software took 10% of their budget and donated to the alternatives? I'd bet that any FOSS project could reach parity to their proprietary counterpart in three years.

The whole point is subscription software is you don’t have 10% left of your budget to finance anything else.

You can also/alternatively subscribe to Blender Studio:

https://studio.blender.org/

You get access to training, assets, source and production logs like the recent Dog Walk update while also supporting Blender:

https://studio.blender.org/projects/dogwalk/production-logs/

I could tip them even without using it, the value of such a successful creative project is a pleasure in itself.

This is the only project I support year in year out. What they did is amazing. Simply amazing.

Especially software like Blender.

It's easily one of the most well-made FOSS projects out there!

I maintain a Blender fork at my company and Blender quite literally is my paycheck, but I disagree vehemently that it is a well-made FOSS project lol.

So .. can you give reasons?

Seconded. I don't know much about the code, but on a usability level it sometimes feels even more polished and pleasing to handle than many big proprietary offerings. I would go so far as to say it's one of the best executed desktop programs of the current era.

Just to share one datapoint - I have not looked at the internals myself, but having talked to a couple of devs who has spent a great deal of time working with Blender at a code level, one takeaway seemed to be that there was a lot of code duplication caused by each dev doing their own thing and not having an overall architect to rationalize some parts of the code.

A particular example that was mentioned was the importers that were each done standalone rather than built on a common framework. This was a couple of years ago and of course things may have changed since then.

Just to note that the developers were still extremely positive about working with and in the code, but it does seem plausible that there would be issues like this in a codebase where many devs focus on a small piece of the overall puzzle.

FWIW, Blender, like other open source projects has been dealing with large bandwidth bills due to AI companies repeatedly crawling them. They've been adding additional checks to try to figure out how to stop spending their limited donations on server infrastructure to support bots.

I believe they were also outright ddos'd last year, by someone who apparently has a beef with Blender.

This isn't reddit your opinion isn't necessary. Donate or don't but your pithy commentary isn't adding to the conversation.

Getting a lot of undeserved pushback, but I sympathise. I have severe CAPTCHA fatigue. Any time I encounter one, unless it's something I need to use and must access, I back out. Even the proof-of-work ones. Fuck 'em. 10 seconds wasted many times a day adds up, and since I use a "strange" OS (Debian or Gentoo Linux) and a "weird" browser (maxed out uBlock and Cookie-Autodelete), ClownFlare hates me and I hate them right back in return.

Counter-point: Stop subsidizing AI companies by giving them free training data.

Counter-counter-point: I like running free models on my computer that were trained on freely accessible data.

We all want free stuff, but somebody still has to pay for that stuff

Information is not "stuff".

Information is absolutely stuff.

How much does that thought cost? How much does it weigh?

Information absolutely has a cost, somebody had to create it.

Weight is just nonsense. Physical presence is not a hard requirement for value.

> Physical presence is not a hard requirement for value.

Physical presence is a requirement for stuff. Stuff has value because of the balance between supply and demand. Information that has been digitally encoded has literally infinite supply. Information only has any value in the context of imaginary property laws that impose artificial scarcity.

AI companies downloading information is not subsidizing AI companies. Imposing imaginary property law is stealing from the public domain. Everyone's public domain.