This is true, however, the commercial version bears almost no resemblance to what we have today. The open source community bears the lions share of the responsibility for how blender looks today.
It's not real Open Source if the community pays for it?
Studios en-mass deciding to fund a shared, Libre resource that anyone can use so that every studio can all benefit and get better features at a faster pace is basically the dream for most Open Source efforts. There's nothing for anyone to be ashamed about from that model, it's good for Open Source to be funded by the players who are most invested in having a really good industry standard available to everyone.
The point being these are snowflake projects, only kept running thanks to some companies pay checks, the large majority of Linux users pays zero anything for desktop software.
Donations and patreon like schemes hardly allow to pay for a mortgage, supermarket, healthcare, transport every single month.
> only kept running thanks to some companies pay checks
I don't understand what you're getting at.
You're arguing that user donations and patreon schemes don't pay enough, but there's something wrong with Blender being funded by the companies that use it?
The companies paying for Blender are a substantial portion of the community. They're funding a common resource that all of them share, and that common resource is being made available to everyone, decreasing the barriers of entry for new talent to get into 3D modeling, increasing the quality of potential hires they can bring on because of its wide availability, providing a common target for addons and tutorials, and providing those same studios with a Libre base that they can build on top of if they need to. This is exactly what is supposed to happen in Open Source, people pay for it because it's a common resource that they care about. That's why companies are investing into it.
What is the funding model for Open Source that you consider legitimate? Pulling in enough money to full-time hire an entire development team doesn't count because you don't like the primary user base? Pretty much everything that Blender is doing here is a success and more Open Source projects should be looking at their governance model and learning from it.
I don't understand a viewpoint that says that Patreon and individual-funded projects are uncompetitive and unsustainable, but also that corporate-funded projects with large donors don't "count" as Open Source success stories. It feels to me like you're defining Open Source as a project with zero funding, and then complaining that it has zero funding. Is Matrix a snowflake project? Is Krita? Is Linux itself?
And anyway, all of this ignores the facts that:
A) Even outside of corporate donations that make the majority of its funding, Blender has also been comparatively way more successful than other OS projects at getting individual user donations (I even donate to Blender just as an individual), because they approach PR and community in a really smart, engaging way that drives enthusiasm. And
B) Blender's funding model has nothing to do with the original thing this thread was talking about, which was just that FLOSS software can be of comparable or better quality than its commercial alternatives. You're kind of jumping around, from first arguing that Blender doesn't count because it started as commercial software, and now arguing that Blender doesn't count because it has funding and that's not typical for other projects.
If FLOSS software overall can pull off commercial competitiveness in many cases underfunded, that's almost more impressive. Imagine how good the Open Source ecosystem would be if we as individual and corporate communities started funding more stuff to the same level as we fund Blender.
If the companies sponsoring Blender, many of which already customers from the commercial days, withdraw their support tomorrow, in a couple of years Blender will turn into another Gimp, as everyone switch to something else to pay their bills.
What I learned from my zealot FOSS days, is that trying to sell FOSS desktop or developer tools is hardly any different from trying to make a living as street musician.
It is cool for a while, eventually it turns into survival, as bitter Winter arrives.
> If the companies sponsoring Blender, many of which already customers from the commercial days, withdraw their support tomorrow, in a couple of years Blender will turn into another Gimp, as everyone switch to something else to pay their bills.
And if the companies buying Slack suddenly stop buying Slack, it will also die. The observation that all software development requires an investment of resources is not a FLOSS-specific observation, and it's not particularly relevant to the conversation about whether FLOSS software is regularly competitive with proprietary alternatives.
It's not really an insight to say that if you starve developers they'll stop developing. We all know that already. And it's also true of every commercial product. When a community switches to another product, the original product withers because it lacks support. That is a correct observation, but what does that have to do with FLOSS? That's just a general principle that applies to everyone.
I don't see you arguing that Slack doesn't count as a competitive product because most of its individual users and small communities use the free version, and some day the big corporations it relies on for the bulk of its revenue might switch to Matrix/Element instead.
> many of which already customers from the commercial days
This is also just not true. Blender's current funding exists because they put in the work to get completely new grants and investments from major game studios like Epic, Ubisoft, Steam, and Microsoft, as well as from hardware manufacturers like NVidia and AMD. Blender's funding has solidly increased from its early days.
Blender is not just sailing on its previous commercial support from its previous commercial days. It didn't get grants in those days, companies generally don't give massive no-strings-attached grants to commercial products. Modern-day Blender has greatly expanded the support it has because the people managing its funding/organization are very smart and have put a metric ton of work into understanding and innovating on existing Open Source PR and community management models.
This is part of why Open Source maintainers and organizers should be paying so much attention to what Blender does, because it is genuinely doing an excellent job selling the idea of a community-supported Open Source standard to large companies.
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Stepping outside of the conversation, just to reiterate one more time: the fact that FLOSS tools are regularly competitive despite receiving on average much less support than their proprietary alternatives is a sign that there is something very cost-efficient about the FLOSS development model, and that pumping more funding into it might be a better use of resources than buying commercial products.
You can argue all you want that Open Source is not sustainable, but there are still a lot of Open Source projects that are of competitive levels of quality compared to their proprietary alternatives.
Could the funding situation be better? Yes. Does the funding situation mean that those projects somehow don't exist, or that they're not currently of comparable quality to their commercial alternatives? No.
It's getting pretty hard to manage for me, the poor maintainer :-). We've always put all our income into paying for development (and hardware, and sprints), so right now on Saturdays I'm being my own secretary/HR person/admin person. It used to be that my Saturdays were for bug triaging...
Be careful of burnout, Krita is wonderful, and I think the community would far prefer a slightly slower pace of dev if it means that the lifestyle is sustainable for you.
Now admittedly it's a little weird since it's basically the underlying software that powers a commercial paid variant (MixBus), but it always had been FOSS from the beginning.
Good luck trying something similar for the desktop market starting from scratch as FOSS.