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>This is an innocent misrepresentation of Blender's development history. While nothing you've said is false, Blender has been open source for more than 2 decade

by jasode 3y ago

>This is an innocent misrepresentation of Blender's development history. While nothing you've said is false, Blender has been open source for more than 2 decades. It began that portion of its life as something of a mess, with a truly Byzantine user interface that made even trivial tasks troublesome, and lacking a vast majority of the features it's now known for. [...] That's what separates it from most open source projects: not that it started as a commercial product, I think your minimization of its original commercial nature with additional facts about the UI is also an innocent misrepresentation. Even though the 2003 Blender didn't have the optimal UI, what the commercial investment did for Blender was put enough value into software such that it had a headstart and momentum for subsequent investment from corporate donors/sponsors and volunteers to create the later UI overhauls. The substantial €4.5M business investment set the stage for the later developments. That it happened 20 years ago isn't the key. What's key is the financial investment to help motivate 20 additional years of work. Compare that to the open-source development of Octave (a MATLAB alternative) where the developer is lacking money and is looking for employment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603575 Observers can say Octave is not as polished as MATLAB. But a similar hypothetical investment of €4.5M of 20 years ago might have helped give it the "Matthew Effect" like Blender got. That the hypothetical Octave v2023 has a revamped UI compared to Octave v2003 would not remove all the causal effects of that hypothetical investment.

jampekka 3y ago
MATLAB is a mess that's in use solely due to history, network effects, stockholm syndrome and vendor lock-in. Octave is doing laudable job in the latter, but I fully expect it to die out after MATLAB whimpers away. And I don't think the GUI is much of a priority for Octave.
crote 3y ago
The €4.5M business investment in 2000 was to make it a freemium product. This obviously failed, which is why the community was able to acquire the rights via a €110k crowdfund. Just because they shoveled a lot of money into it, doesn't mean they actually created a great product. Blender wouldn't have been open-source today if the investors didn't decide to shut down the (quite incomplete) project due to disappointing sales. The next substantial investment was a €1.2M grant in 2019, and it was a direct result of the development of 2.80, both the new GUI and other improvements. It suddenly became an actual viable alternative to commercial products, making it worth investing in. These developments only happened due to the hard work of mostly volunteers, and a lot of donations from primarily the community.
yterdy 3y ago
>Even though the 2003 Blender didn't have the optimal UI, what the commercial investment did for Blender was put enough value into software such that it had a headstart and momentum for subsequent investment from corporate donors/sponsors and volunteers to create the later UI overhauls. The substantial €4.5M business investment set the stage for the later developments. It did not, because Blender went 7+ years without substantial improvements to its modeling and rendering tools and interface. It was a zombie, with a lot of resources wasted on the now-defunct game engine. The pivot away from what it had been is what made Blender what it is today.
- jasode 3y ago
  >yterdy: Blender went 7+ years without substantial improvements to its modeling and rendering tools and interface. It was a zombie, with a lot of resources wasted on the now-defunct game engine. The pivot away from what it had been is what made Blender what it is today. >crote: Just because they shoveled a lot of money into it, doesn't mean they actually created a great product. I'm citing these 2 comments because it's another example of mentioning observations that can be true -- but are still not a good explanation of _why_ Blender's level of polish is different from other open-source projects. You guys are emphasizing the artifacts of the software as the proof of Blender's unique situation. Instead of the artifacts, I'm emphasizing the _community_ and _why_ they're invested in Blender to motivate the work on the subsequent artifacts (e.g. revamped UI) that you're referring to. The explanation of the community momentum starts from the business investment. In this framing, it doesn't matter that Blender v2003 wasn't great software. What matters is that v2003 (with whatever flaws) -- attracted enough community -- to keep working on it (and eventually "pivoting") for 20 years. I go back to this you claimed as the key reason : >yterdy: , but because its designers and developers stowed their egos and worked diligently on creating a solid piece of software That would be a more convincing argument if the developers used the 2002 crowdsource money to build a clean-room rewrite from scratch instead of buying the existing codebase to get the millions in sunk development work at a steep discount. E.g., if what truly matters is the humble developer egos rather than the value of the exiting codebase, then there was no need to buy the old codebase. Just advertise the 2002 crowdsource money as paying for humble diligent developers to build a new 3D modeler from scratch. But that's not what happened. Both the crowdfunders and the original developers wanted that old codebase that was already paid for by business investments as a starting point. Even though the later v2.5 was a big rewrite, that doesn't change how the community thought of the v2002 software. It already has the interest level and evangelism to attract future work leading to the 2.5 rewrite. If Blender was "zombie" software, _why_ were people working on "bad software" to make it better? Work backwards from that. Consider the motivations and interests. Saying "Blender v2003 wasn't great" doesn't really explain things.
danShumway 3y ago
This feels like a bit of an over-extrapolation. Blender succeeded in no small part because of investment. As a commercial product, it failed. We shouldn't say that being commercial is a model for success, Blender tried being commercial and it didn't work. If it had stayed commercial and had not been Open Sourced, it likely wouldn't exist today. As a side effect of its origins and what people saw as the opportunity behind the project, it then got a lot of investment, and it turns out that Open Source projects with heavy involvement from their userbase (and not just from programmers) and with heavy monetary investments and a positive community that gets excited about the project -- it turns out that yields exceptional tools. But it's not the commercial aspect that caused that, the investments caused that, and other Open Source projects could be given the same level of investment -- after all, many of them are as good or as competitive (if not more competitive) than Blender was when it was Open Sourced. As an Open Source program Blender has introduced architectural improvements and structural improvements that rival its origin, and it was able to do that without going commercial, which is evidence that this kind of investment and funding can exist for a non-commercial project if a significant portion of a community and businesses think the project is worth funding. It is arguable that starting out as a commercial project helped fuel that optimism. But to say Blender owes its success to being commercial feels backwards. Blender owes its success to the fact that it stopped being commercial, which was (and is) a contributing factor to why people and organizations feel so good donating to it. Like if we're going to take a lesson away from Blender, that lesson might be, "want to compete with Maya? Dissolve your company and give away your code." I very much believe that Blender wouldn't have a community today if it had stuck with its commercial origins.
- jasode 3y ago
  >As a commercial product, it failed. We shouldn't say that being commercial is a model for success, [...] But to say Blender owes its success to being commercial feels backwards. You're misunderstanding what my attempted explanation is about. You're arguing about reasons for Blender's success. That's not my angle. My explanation is about something else: why Blender's level of polish (not "success") seems to be so advanced in relative comparison with other open source projects out there such as Gimp, etc. In other words, people's expectations of open-source software usability/polish is so low that Blender's level of execution is surprising. This is the gp's particular wording I'm commenting on, >" I'm amazed at how professional and finished Blender is for being an open source project." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38262825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38262825) The negative (usability) connotations with the phrase "for being an open source project" is something I've analyzed before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29605885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29605885 ...all those open-source projects (Gimp, SageMath, etc) that are GUI instead of command-line that people complain of not having the polish of their peers -- don't have Blender's unique accidental history of having the (failed) commercial product kickstart the momentum and evangelism of a community to make subsequent Blender versions eventually exceed the expectations of typical open source projects. The multi-millions gave it a unusual headstart that Gimp, Octave, etc do not have. I do agree with the following parts of your comment which don't contradict my argument: >Blender owes its success to the fact that it stopped being commercial, which was (and is) a contributing factor to why people and organizations feel so good donating to it. [...] I very much believe that Blender wouldn't have a community today if it had stuck with its commercial origins.

by jasode 3y ago

jampekka 3y ago

MATLAB is a mess that's in use solely due to history, network effects, stockholm syndrome and vendor lock-in. Octave is doing laudable job in the latter, but I fully expect it to die out after MATLAB whimpers away. And I don't think the GUI is much of a priority for Octave.

crote 3y ago

The €4.5M business investment in 2000 was to make it a freemium product. This obviously failed, which is why the community was able to acquire the rights via a €110k crowdfund. Just because they shoveled a lot of money into it, doesn't mean they actually created a great product. Blender wouldn't have been open-source today if the investors didn't decide to shut down the (quite incomplete) project due to disappointing sales. The next substantial investment was a €1.2M grant in 2019, and it was a direct result of the development of 2.80, both the new GUI and other improvements. It suddenly became an actual viable alternative to commercial products, making it worth investing in. These developments only happened due to the hard work of mostly volunteers, and a lot of donations from primarily the community.

yterdy 3y ago

>Even though the 2003 Blender didn't have the optimal UI, what the commercial investment did for Blender was put enough value into software such that it had a headstart and momentum for subsequent investment from corporate donors/sponsors and volunteers to create the later UI overhauls. The substantial €4.5M business investment set the stage for the later developments. It did not, because Blender went 7+ years without substantial improvements to its modeling and rendering tools and interface. It was a zombie, with a lot of resources wasted on the now-defunct game engine. The pivot away from what it had been is what made Blender what it is today.

jasode 3y ago
>yterdy: Blender went 7+ years without substantial improvements to its modeling and rendering tools and interface. It was a zombie, with a lot of resources wasted on the now-defunct game engine. The pivot away from what it had been is what made Blender what it is today. >crote: Just because they shoveled a lot of money into it, doesn't mean they actually created a great product. I'm citing these 2 comments because it's another example of mentioning observations that can be true -- but are still not a good explanation of _why_ Blender's level of polish is different from other open-source projects. You guys are emphasizing the artifacts of the software as the proof of Blender's unique situation. Instead of the artifacts, I'm emphasizing the _community_ and _why_ they're invested in Blender to motivate the work on the subsequent artifacts (e.g. revamped UI) that you're referring to. The explanation of the community momentum starts from the business investment. In this framing, it doesn't matter that Blender v2003 wasn't great software. What matters is that v2003 (with whatever flaws) -- attracted enough community -- to keep working on it (and eventually "pivoting") for 20 years. I go back to this you claimed as the key reason : >yterdy: , but because its designers and developers stowed their egos and worked diligently on creating a solid piece of software That would be a more convincing argument if the developers used the 2002 crowdsource money to build a clean-room rewrite from scratch instead of buying the existing codebase to get the millions in sunk development work at a steep discount. E.g., if what truly matters is the humble developer egos rather than the value of the exiting codebase, then there was no need to buy the old codebase. Just advertise the 2002 crowdsource money as paying for humble diligent developers to build a new 3D modeler from scratch. But that's not what happened. Both the crowdfunders and the original developers wanted that old codebase that was already paid for by business investments as a starting point. Even though the later v2.5 was a big rewrite, that doesn't change how the community thought of the v2002 software. It already has the interest level and evangelism to attract future work leading to the 2.5 rewrite. If Blender was "zombie" software, _why_ were people working on "bad software" to make it better? Work backwards from that. Consider the motivations and interests. Saying "Blender v2003 wasn't great" doesn't really explain things.

danShumway 3y ago

This feels like a bit of an over-extrapolation. Blender succeeded in no small part because of investment. As a commercial product, it failed. We shouldn't say that being commercial is a model for success, Blender tried being commercial and it didn't work. If it had stayed commercial and had not been Open Sourced, it likely wouldn't exist today. As a side effect of its origins and what people saw as the opportunity behind the project, it then got a lot of investment, and it turns out that Open Source projects with heavy involvement from their userbase (and not just from programmers) and with heavy monetary investments and a positive community that gets excited about the project -- it turns out that yields exceptional tools. But it's not the commercial aspect that caused that, the investments caused that, and other Open Source projects could be given the same level of investment -- after all, many of them are as good or as competitive (if not more competitive) than Blender was when it was Open Sourced. As an Open Source program Blender has introduced architectural improvements and structural improvements that rival its origin, and it was able to do that without going commercial, which is evidence that this kind of investment and funding can exist for a non-commercial project if a significant portion of a community and businesses think the project is worth funding. It is arguable that starting out as a commercial project helped fuel that optimism. But to say Blender owes its success to being commercial feels backwards. Blender owes its success to the fact that it stopped being commercial, which was (and is) a contributing factor to why people and organizations feel so good donating to it. Like if we're going to take a lesson away from Blender, that lesson might be, "want to compete with Maya? Dissolve your company and give away your code." I very much believe that Blender wouldn't have a community today if it had stuck with its commercial origins.

jasode 3y ago
>As a commercial product, it failed. We shouldn't say that being commercial is a model for success, [...] But to say Blender owes its success to being commercial feels backwards. You're misunderstanding what my attempted explanation is about. You're arguing about reasons for Blender's success. That's not my angle. My explanation is about something else: why Blender's level of polish (not "success") seems to be so advanced in relative comparison with other open source projects out there such as Gimp, etc. In other words, people's expectations of open-source software usability/polish is so low that Blender's level of execution is surprising. This is the gp's particular wording I'm commenting on, >" I'm amazed at how professional and finished Blender is for being an open source project." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38262825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38262825) The negative (usability) connotations with the phrase "for being an open source project" is something I've analyzed before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29605885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29605885 ...all those open-source projects (Gimp, SageMath, etc) that are GUI instead of command-line that people complain of not having the polish of their peers -- don't have Blender's unique accidental history of having the (failed) commercial product kickstart the momentum and evangelism of a community to make subsequent Blender versions eventually exceed the expectations of typical open source projects. The multi-millions gave it a unusual headstart that Gimp, Octave, etc do not have. I do agree with the following parts of your comment which don't contradict my argument: >Blender owes its success to the fact that it stopped being commercial, which was (and is) a contributing factor to why people and organizations feel so good donating to it. [...] I very much believe that Blender wouldn't have a community today if it had stuck with its commercial origins.