4 ms·

What about blender, vlc, and Firefox?

• bsder 6y ago
  Firefox and Blender have significant commercial investment behind them to keep them maintained. And they both started out as proprietary. VLC I don't know about. The fact that there are so few successful, non-programming examples exactly demonstrates the point.
  • detaro 6y ago
    Blender has significant investment because users pay developers for its maintenance, yes.
  • astrange 6y ago
    VLC is mostly based on ffmpeg which didn't have much public commercial sponsorship for years, until the post-YouTube era, where there was some sponsorship from Google but mostly just a lot more small and large closed-source developers releasing crappy "video converter programs" and not crediting it. It instead was mostly developed by a schizophrenic Austrian math genius in his free time from not being regularly employed, plus some other grad student types.