Even small companies can create competitive high-end renderers today so it's not much of a differentiator. Filmmaking is about human talent mostly, not technolo

Even small companies can create competitive high-end renderers today so it's not much of a differentiator. Filmmaking is about human talent mostly, not technology. (Same thing happened in live-action filmmaking, anyone can afford the equipment today.) But there's a huge advantage to being the first high-end renderer to go open source, so lots of small studios will adopt it if it's as solid as it looks. It'll become available in Blender. Maintenance will then get extended to the community, including (most likely) support for alternate shading schemes (MaterialX/Lama has decent momentum right now, converging with Sony's OpenShadingLanguage). Apache 2.0 is an ideal license for this kind of project.