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Obviously Autodesk is massive beyond Maya and animation. Do you expect this to influence their profits significantly? If yes when? Did they already "react" to

Obviously Autodesk is massive beyond Maya and animation. Do you expect this to influence their profits significantly? If yes when? Did they already "react" to Blender (e.g. by speeding up development)?

mistercheph 2y ago
No matter how large the lead may be today, autodesk (and next-in-line Adobe) are case studies in why OSS will always win given enough time because although OSS can suffer from many chronic and debilitating diseases, they rarely catch the fatal ones that plague commercial software development. Yes, the OSS development structure leads to projects that lag behind proprietary solutions for amounts of time that are measured in decades, but nobody will ever have to re-write GIMP from scratch because the market had a bad hair day and somebody got acquired by a sovereign wealth fund that gets bored and runs the project into the ground. That doesn't change anything about the fact that e.g. GIMP, or freeCAD suck today, but someone(s) will almost certainly still be carrying those torches in 50 years, or the torches of superior FOSS competitors. And in the next 50 years, Adobe and Autodesk will almost certainly suffer total death or become skeleton crews that only service legacy clients, and when that happens, all of the collective human talent that went into building those tools and human experience into mastering their use will burn up into the screaming void while GIMP chugs along, putting out a release candidate for their GTK4 port.
- baq 2y ago
  On the contrary I wouldn’t write Autodesk off anytime soon. I’ve recently gotten into the 3d printing hobby and Fusion is not miles ahead of oss offerings, it’s in a different galaxy and it has a very generous free tier for folks like me. Most importantly I don’t see a cross section between oss developers and cad teams to drive the collaborative features. I don’t think the critical mass to get this going exists.
  - therein 2y ago
    > Most importantly I don’t see a cross section between oss developers and cad teams to drive the collaborative features. I don’t think the critical mass to get this going exists. Replace CAD with 3D modelling and animation and that was my genuine opinion 15 years ago about Blender. That being said, OSS projects can definitely go in the wrong direction but since history is preserved, at least someone else can come and fork before the codebase takes the wrong direction.
  - leoedin 2y ago
    Open source CAD has improved a lot in the last few years. You can use FreeCAD for modelling simple parts today and it mostly works. That wasn’t the case a few years ago. There was a time KiCAD was a buggy mess. And no doubt blender as well.
    - thyristan 2y ago
      Blender is rock-solid and very smoothly usable, and as a beginner, I won't find anything missing or buggy. It would take a beginner years to get to the limitations, corner cases and broken things. KiCAD is solid, very usable, but not totally smooth. The workflow is still far away from blender-like total integration and bliss. Where ten years ago you could find the occasional bug, a beginner won't find any nowadays. FreeCAD only just last year started shipping releases that don't nullpointer after 2 minutes. Even a beginner with a trivial project will stumble over bugs, limitations, problems and design flaws. There is a huge difference in quality, and KiCAD will get to Blender levels certainly. But FreeCAD will take forever, if the pace continues like that.
    - criddell 2y ago
      FreeCAD is built on top of Open Cascade and I think that’s what’s going to limit them. It was a fast way to get to v1, but there’s only so much that project can do to work around the limitations of the library they built on.
- Shorel 2y ago
  > but nobody will ever have to re-write GIMP from scratch IMO, they should If current trends follow, GIMP and Photoshop replacement will be a web application like Pixlr and Photopea.
  - tough 2y ago
    It will probably just be AI as per ChatGPT 4o image generations / edition capabilities
  - Voultapher 2y ago
    > or the torches of superior FOSS competitors GIMP is just hot garbage, speaking from personal experience. All workflows are destructive, the layer workflow is pointy and annoying in so many small and big ways. Performance is bad as well. Small example, take a piece of text and rotate it. After you have rotated it, it no longer is a piece of text it's a slightly blurry piece of pixels. Want to rotate it again? It's now an even more blurry piece of pixels, getting blurrier every time you rotate it. Want to change the text? Start from scratch. Like come on those are the basics and they suck. Personally I don't see it getting a fundamental overhaul, simply because many users are used to the existing workflows and would be upset. I see real competition coming from other projects. But who knows, in general I agree with the sentiment that OSS' endurance is much better.
    - dagw 2y ago
      Personally I don't see it getting a fundamental overhaul Have you looked at latest release of GIMP? It's just gotten a fundamental overhaul, including support for non-destructive workflows and better text tools. Still has a long way to go obviously and is moving very slowly, but changes are happening.
    - mistercheph 2y ago
      I don't know whether it will pan out, or whether other major issues will prevent GIMP from ever reaching the status that Blender has gotten to, but GIMP 3 has started shipping some non destructive filters (https://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-3.0.html#non-destructive-layer-effects https://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-3.0.html#non-destruc...) and I (from a distance) understand moving to NDE to be a long term goal of the project
raincole 2y ago
Autodesk changed their pricing model in 2019 (added an indie tier). That was their reaction to the competition. Besides that, Maya did get quite some animation features lately. But in the end Blender has got "good enough and free" state and there is nothing Maya can do about that. That being said, Maya isn't going away anytime soon. There are just way too many Python scripts called Maya API in the industry.
edanm 2y ago
> Do you expect this to influence their profits significantly? If yes when? (Context - former Autodesk employee, though obviously all views here are my own, and I'm not commenting on anything I had any involvement in or direct knowledge of - only publicly available information.) Look up where Autodesk's profits come from sometime, and you'll see that 3d animation is close to meaningless to Autodesks's bottom line, at least in terms of direct profits. I just asked ChatGPT and assuming it's accurate (I haven't double checked but it fits with what I vaguely remember), the Media & Entertainment product families, which include 3ds Max, Maya etc, make up only 5% of total revenue, as opposed to: Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) (48% of revenue), AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT (25% of revenue) and Manufacturing (MFG) (20% of revenue).

mistercheph 2y ago

No matter how large the lead may be today, autodesk (and next-in-line Adobe) are case studies in why OSS will always win given enough time because although OSS can suffer from many chronic and debilitating diseases, they rarely catch the fatal ones that plague commercial software development. Yes, the OSS development structure leads to projects that lag behind proprietary solutions for amounts of time that are measured in decades, but nobody will ever have to re-write GIMP from scratch because the market had a bad hair day and somebody got acquired by a sovereign wealth fund that gets bored and runs the project into the ground. That doesn't change anything about the fact that e.g. GIMP, or freeCAD suck today, but someone(s) will almost certainly still be carrying those torches in 50 years, or the torches of superior FOSS competitors. And in the next 50 years, Adobe and Autodesk will almost certainly suffer total death or become skeleton crews that only service legacy clients, and when that happens, all of the collective human talent that went into building those tools and human experience into mastering their use will burn up into the screaming void while GIMP chugs along, putting out a release candidate for their GTK4 port.

baq 2y ago
On the contrary I wouldn’t write Autodesk off anytime soon. I’ve recently gotten into the 3d printing hobby and Fusion is not miles ahead of oss offerings, it’s in a different galaxy and it has a very generous free tier for folks like me. Most importantly I don’t see a cross section between oss developers and cad teams to drive the collaborative features. I don’t think the critical mass to get this going exists.
- therein 2y ago
  > Most importantly I don’t see a cross section between oss developers and cad teams to drive the collaborative features. I don’t think the critical mass to get this going exists. Replace CAD with 3D modelling and animation and that was my genuine opinion 15 years ago about Blender. That being said, OSS projects can definitely go in the wrong direction but since history is preserved, at least someone else can come and fork before the codebase takes the wrong direction.
- leoedin 2y ago
  Open source CAD has improved a lot in the last few years. You can use FreeCAD for modelling simple parts today and it mostly works. That wasn’t the case a few years ago. There was a time KiCAD was a buggy mess. And no doubt blender as well.
  - thyristan 2y ago
    Blender is rock-solid and very smoothly usable, and as a beginner, I won't find anything missing or buggy. It would take a beginner years to get to the limitations, corner cases and broken things. KiCAD is solid, very usable, but not totally smooth. The workflow is still far away from blender-like total integration and bliss. Where ten years ago you could find the occasional bug, a beginner won't find any nowadays. FreeCAD only just last year started shipping releases that don't nullpointer after 2 minutes. Even a beginner with a trivial project will stumble over bugs, limitations, problems and design flaws. There is a huge difference in quality, and KiCAD will get to Blender levels certainly. But FreeCAD will take forever, if the pace continues like that.
  - criddell 2y ago
    FreeCAD is built on top of Open Cascade and I think that’s what’s going to limit them. It was a fast way to get to v1, but there’s only so much that project can do to work around the limitations of the library they built on.
Shorel 2y ago
> but nobody will ever have to re-write GIMP from scratch IMO, they should If current trends follow, GIMP and Photoshop replacement will be a web application like Pixlr and Photopea.
- tough 2y ago
  It will probably just be AI as per ChatGPT 4o image generations / edition capabilities
- Voultapher 2y ago
  > or the torches of superior FOSS competitors GIMP is just hot garbage, speaking from personal experience. All workflows are destructive, the layer workflow is pointy and annoying in so many small and big ways. Performance is bad as well. Small example, take a piece of text and rotate it. After you have rotated it, it no longer is a piece of text it's a slightly blurry piece of pixels. Want to rotate it again? It's now an even more blurry piece of pixels, getting blurrier every time you rotate it. Want to change the text? Start from scratch. Like come on those are the basics and they suck. Personally I don't see it getting a fundamental overhaul, simply because many users are used to the existing workflows and would be upset. I see real competition coming from other projects. But who knows, in general I agree with the sentiment that OSS' endurance is much better.
  - dagw 2y ago
    Personally I don't see it getting a fundamental overhaul Have you looked at latest release of GIMP? It's just gotten a fundamental overhaul, including support for non-destructive workflows and better text tools. Still has a long way to go obviously and is moving very slowly, but changes are happening.
  - mistercheph 2y ago
    I don't know whether it will pan out, or whether other major issues will prevent GIMP from ever reaching the status that Blender has gotten to, but GIMP 3 has started shipping some non destructive filters (https://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-3.0.html#non-destructive-layer-effects https://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-3.0.html#non-destruc...) and I (from a distance) understand moving to NDE to be a long term goal of the project

raincole 2y ago

Autodesk changed their pricing model in 2019 (added an indie tier). That was their reaction to the competition. Besides that, Maya did get quite some animation features lately. But in the end Blender has got "good enough and free" state and there is nothing Maya can do about that. That being said, Maya isn't going away anytime soon. There are just way too many Python scripts called Maya API in the industry.

edanm 2y ago

> Do you expect this to influence their profits significantly? If yes when? (Context - former Autodesk employee, though obviously all views here are my own, and I'm not commenting on anything I had any involvement in or direct knowledge of - only publicly available information.) Look up where Autodesk's profits come from sometime, and you'll see that 3d animation is close to meaningless to Autodesks's bottom line, at least in terms of direct profits. I just asked ChatGPT and assuming it's accurate (I haven't double checked but it fits with what I vaguely remember), the Media & Entertainment product families, which include 3ds Max, Maya etc, make up only 5% of total revenue, as opposed to: Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) (48% of revenue), AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT (25% of revenue) and Manufacturing (MFG) (20% of revenue).