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> I'm amazed at how professional and finished Blender is for being an open source project. It feels like I'm using an Adobe product or similar. The "open sour

by jasode 3y ago

> I'm amazed at how professional and finished Blender is for being an open source project. It feels like I'm using an Adobe product or similar. The "open source" label applied to Blender today inadvertently minimizes the commercial origins of it. Blender's development has a unique (accidental) history that other open-source projects can't replicate deliberately: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/getting_started/about/history.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/getting_started/ab... In summary: - Blender was originally paid commercial software that attracts venture capitalists to invest €4.5M and funds the salaries of 50 people to work on it - The VC investors later sell it at a loss for €100k back to the original team to release it as open source. Because many users of Blender are unfamiliar with the timeline of its development, they wonder why other open-source software like Gimp "isn't more polished" like Adobe Photoshop. Well, Gimp never had investors write off €4.5M of development on it.

magpi3 3y ago
Haven't used it in ages, but Blender did not feel like an Adobe product when it was first open sourced. IIRC its UI was considered notoriously unintuitive.
yterdy 3y ago
That was literally over 20 years ago. The majority of Blender's development has taken place while it was open-source; most of the features it's known for did not exist in the commercial version.
js8 3y ago
With selling it as OSS, they only wrote off 4.4M euros. So given the situation it was still a better option for investors.
danShumway 3y ago
> Gimp never had investors write off €4.5M of development on it. Notably, there is literally nothing stopping other Open Source projects from being given grants of millions of dollars other than social convention. We saw this with Godot after Unity. There's a coordination problem here, but we all mostly recognize that many of these fundamental tools would be better if we all collectively put our resources into an Open tool that is focused on serving the community rather than exploiting it. It's just that without shocking events that prompt the bigger players to say, "you know what, heck this, let's just fund a good tool", it's very tough to get people to make that kind of investment, even though it would very likely be better for them and in the long-run more cost effective for them if they did. I would argue that the majority of Blender's development (both architecturally and in terms of cost) happened after its commercial origins. But Blender continued to get investment because the community was invested in building a usable tool that wouldn't force them to deal with the crap of the other commercial products in the 3D industry.

by jasode 3y ago

magpi3 3y ago

Haven't used it in ages, but Blender did not feel like an Adobe product when it was first open sourced. IIRC its UI was considered notoriously unintuitive.

yterdy 3y ago

That was literally over 20 years ago. The majority of Blender's development has taken place while it was open-source; most of the features it's known for did not exist in the commercial version.

js8 3y ago

With selling it as OSS, they only wrote off 4.4M euros. So given the situation it was still a better option for investors.

danShumway 3y ago

> Gimp never had investors write off €4.5M of development on it. Notably, there is literally nothing stopping other Open Source projects from being given grants of millions of dollars other than social convention. We saw this with Godot after Unity. There's a coordination problem here, but we all mostly recognize that many of these fundamental tools would be better if we all collectively put our resources into an Open tool that is focused on serving the community rather than exploiting it. It's just that without shocking events that prompt the bigger players to say, "you know what, heck this, let's just fund a good tool", it's very tough to get people to make that kind of investment, even though it would very likely be better for them and in the long-run more cost effective for them if they did. I would argue that the majority of Blender's development (both architecturally and in terms of cost) happened after its commercial origins. But Blender continued to get investment because the community was invested in building a usable tool that wouldn't force them to deal with the crap of the other commercial products in the 3D industry.