> 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 grant

> 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.