Unlike most open source projects, Blender started its life as a professional piece of software by and for artists who had to deliver commercial projects on a dead line. First as an in house tool for an animation studio, and later as a commercial software product. It only became open source later in its life cycle after the commercial Blender company went bankrupt. It has also been headed by the same lead developer from its earliest days as an in-house tool right up until today. All these things really shine through and make it quiet unique among open source applications.
Blender only became successful well after it was made open source.
As a commercial project it was a failure. It only became successful due to two decades of open-source development, and the willingness of its users to invest in it - even if only to stimulate the development of a competitor to expensive proprietary software.
Blender only became an even remotely viable option in 2011, after being open-source for 9 years. Its popularity only really started in 2019 after a massive UI rework made it actually nice to use. This and related changes led to Blender receiving a $1.2M grant in 2019, leading to other companies re-evaluating it and awarding even more grants.
If anything, compared to today's successes its initial proprietary development should be seen as nothing more than a historical curiosity.
Blender received huge infusions of cash before 2019.
Back in the mid 2000s, I was on the "FOSS talk circuit" in Europe talking about Ardour. Blender stuff was often happening in the room next door (way more people ... graphics ... sigh :)
Blender got huge grants from both the EU and also, I think, Apple back in the mid-to-late 2000s that in retrospect look critical in boosting them out of their somewhat "stuck" development status.
It's not a historical curiosity. The decisions needed to make an architecture viable on the long term happen early on and need to be sustained as code is being developed.
A lot of that comes down to days structures used, system modules, abstractions, If that's done right, it's possible to make a good UX later.
That's very hard in modern software processes which emphasize short term spirits.
I still remember when I first discovered Blender. It was around the time Blender 2.8 had just been released with its new UI. At that point, some people still preferred using 2.7 because the new UI was too different for them. The first thing that blew my mind was the size of the download, which was around 50MB. I had expected to have to download much more than that, which is typical for creative, graphical applications. After using it for a while, I recognized how polished and powerful Blender is compared to other opensource projects I had used before such as GIMP. 3D is not my professional work, I use it as a hobby, and I've learned and created many 3D works that were only made possible because Blender is free. The community on YouTube and Stack Exchange is large and friendly as well. I just love Blender so much.
Blender has such a rich and amazing history! I used it for some hobby projects many years ago, but the UI was very complex and the learning curve was high. Recent versions have greatly simplified the UI and the features feel on par with many of the proprietary industry tools. The future definitely seems bright.
Most of this is technically true but not really relevant, and no, this is not what makes it stand out.
Very little of what constitutes modern Blender came from NeoGeo/NaN. The original software was uncompetitive and unremarkable. In fact, Blender had to change most of its original UI conventions to feel less alien for CGI professionals. (because the original paradigm was from the ancient times before the commonplace UI conventions)
What made it stand out in the open-source community is devs using it for actually creating something (best investment!), positioning it at the intersection of interests of non-competing companies that need to get shit done, and also attracting a massive army of game modders.
Not really, I find the blender workflow is still very similar to the old 1.7, fits on a floppy disk, days.
It's the same modal editor with a million hotkeys and dense packed stacked dialogs, the most intrusive workflow change was when they swapped the default mouse keys.
Not to say the blender project has not done amazing work making things more discoverable. But as a occasional blender user from the sgi 1.X days. I suspect "the complete 3.0 overhaul making blender more standard" was more marketing than anything else. Blender had got a reputation has being hard to learn(all 3d programs are hard to learn). So while they did do a lot of work on the UI and it is much better, mainly it was loudly saying "we made the UI easier" and everybody sort of went along with it.
Interesting but the special part about blender is the open source part, they managed to keep it alive, revamp the UI fully and bring on new and hard features on a regular basis. I don't remember another foss project of that kind.
KiCad is slowly inching in this direction! It used to be an absolute pain to use 3-4 years ago, but it has significantly matured since then.
With the death of EAGLE it's rapidly becoming the obvious choice for all hobbyist use, and it is powerful enough for quite a bit of commercial work too. It definitely isn't at Altium's level yet, but unless you're designing something like a motherboard you probably won't be missing much.
krita.org is a similarly polished and professional open source project, but I agree these types of projects are the exception rather than the rule (though I suppose the same could be said about most products).
Krita isn't on the same level as Blender, but it's not on the same level as other Open Source projects either. I'd put it in the same camp as projects like Ardour, and arguably above projects like Godot (although I'm sure some people would debate me on that).
It's an exceptional drawing tool that is well-suited for professional work and is headed in a really promising direction. It's got a couple of weaknesses (vector layers) but it really shouldn't be discounted as a professional-level tool.
Unless you're claiming that Inkscape is in the same position and has gotten a lot better than the last time I used it, which :shrug: could be true, I don't know. I'm not trying to bash Inkscape here.
I can vouch for Krita and Inkscape pairing well as vector art programs and even doing things that CSP, whose vector layers are pretty well liked, can't match. The issue is that drawing in Inkscape is a little bit broken(it can be done, but the current UX is death by papercut) - thus I approach it through the other program, which is basic but consistent.
So the workflow I end up using for digital inks is: Open both programs, sketch in Krita, copy-paste the vector data into Inkscape, stroke->path, then use tweak tool to sculpt the lines. This adds line weight in seconds-to-minutes. Alternately, I can apply path effects instead of stroke->path, if I want a more programmatic design. If I want to paint, I can copy-paste the shape back into Krita.
As a hobbyist digital painter and 3D artist who has used both Blender and Krita, I strongly disagree with this. Krita is simply best-in-class at digital painting on a PC. Both are exceptional pieces of software.
It did take me a week or two to adjust to Krita’s hotkeys coming from a lifetime of Photoshop, but the software in the end is leagues better for painting.
no but he's right, there's a level of polish that was higher than average there too, i actually thought about it but couldn't remember the name when i wrote.
Would you consider Audacity another example? (I'm one of the original authors.) It survived for ~20 years as a community-supported project - it was popular but clunky and limited in many ways. Since being acquired by Muse the UI has been cleaned up and modernized quite a bit, while still keeping it open-source.
(That's a "yes". Blender 2.4 was an in-house gamedev asset authoring tool that was open sourced, Blender 2.8+ is very different and apparently pretty pro-level.
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. Getting it to its contemporary state was a long and painful process, including at least two major front-end overhauls and who-knows-how-many under-the-hood, and a commendable (though not unimpugnable) humility from developers who (finally) found the wherewithal to put the user experience before FOSS dogma or their own ambitions.
That's what separates it from most open source projects: not that it started as a commercial product, but because its designers and developers stowed their egos and worked diligently on creating a solid piece of software (and documentation and community and support) for a long, long time. In this way, it surpasses even many of its commercial contemporaries, which are driven by a profit motive to become increasingly paywalled and enshitified.
>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
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.
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.
>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)
...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.
Sorry for the misunderstanding. Unfortunately, I sort of feel like I would disagree more with your statement now that I understand it better? :D
I think the majority of Blender's polish came after being Open Sourced, and I don't think that movement was kickstarted by its origins. I do think its origins arguably played a role in its investment, but early Blender had a reputation of being exactly like many other Open Source projects -- powerful if you knew how to use it, but unpolished and arcane and difficult to learn.
When I first ran into the Blender, its interface was the biggest criticism I saw online about the project. Wherever the momentum came from to say "we could refactor this and make it attractive to regular modelers" I don't think that momentum was present in its early days or right after it was Open Sourced.
I'm tempted to dig into the history a bit more now, because I bet if I went back in HN history to the early 2.0 days, I would find comments saying that Blender is just like other Open Source projects in that its too confusing and difficult to use. The interface was what everyone trashed about Blender.
Of course investment helped with giving Blender the ability to undergo those kinds of radical transformations, but the transformations were sorely needed and I'm not sure that its UI was what fueled that investment. I think both overstate the connection, but I'm more sympathetic to a claim that Blender's commercial origins fueled its architecture or resources than I am to a claim that it fed its interface polish or excitement about its interface.
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Personally, I think the biggest contributor to Blender's interface is the fact that its community is made up of a ton of artists and not just programmers. Additionally, a lot of its investment is coming from studios -- notably not from a company catered to studios, but specifically from people who are using the tool in-house as they develop it. Greasepencil in particular is heavily influenced by this; the current rewrite for Greasepencil 3.0 is being pushed and developed by people who are intimately familiar with Greasepencil as a creative tool.
In theory, Open Source should be a much better match for this than commercial software, because commercial software caters to a client-base but is developed usually by a player outside of that space that is seeking to monetize it. Open Source often falls into the same trap, but at least has the possibility to be developed and driven and to have feature requests prioritized primarily by artists and community members who rely on the software rather than by a separate entity that is interested primarily in how the software is marketed or sold. That Open Source very often fails at this is (imo) more of a commentary on the lack of community experience and community investment that most projects have. Stereotypical GUI Open Source projects are very often the result of external efforts from people who are not trained in GUI work and who are not quite as closely tied to their users.
I'd bring up Krita as another example here -- Krita has no commercial origins (https://krita.org/en/about/krita-releases-overview/) but is miles ahead of Gimp in terms of building a polished interface that caters to artists. One immediately obvious difference is that Krita's artist community is heavily engaged in the project and in regular communication with the developers and regularly gets involved in feature development and prototyping and testing. <incorrect, see correction below>In fact, Krita started out as a fork of Gimp, and yet has surpassed Gimp in terms of ease of use and polish.</incorrect>
In a recent comment on one of my DSP plugin videos I directly addressed this:
"I think this is because plugins are made for people to pay attention to them and then buy more plugins. I just do patreon, so I make plugins to be used, and only by those who need them. They should be boring and never change, but the sound should be amazing and just immediately there so you can pay attention to the music, not the plugin, and then not have to buy more."
That's the secret to open source software if we choose to maintain it. There's a catch: OSS projects also gain mindshare through promotion and attention, putting them on exactly the same grounds as commercial software, and if you had an ideal project that perfectly met a need without drawing any attention to itself, that need would prosper and the OSS project would languish.
It's the old 'tiny piece of unsupported OSS software on which the world depends' problem. You absolutely can do that and the cost is that the project either languishes or fails (in the sense that it can't be maintained, not that it fails its task). Or you can lean towards seeking payback, in the form of money or in the form of attention, and it costs the users something but sustains the project more fully.
Krita was never a fork of Gimp (and that's not what your link says). The idea of a Qt wrapper around Gimp was a kind of inspiration for Krita in a roundabout way but the codebases are entirely separate.
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.
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.
>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.
>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.
>The explanation of the community momentum starts from the business investment.
Again, an emphatic, "No." Blender's massive improvements in the early-to-mid 2010s are what brought investment from outside sources, not the other way around. It was an artifact around which interested parties could rally; that says nothing of its value as an executable piece of software, but rather its value as a focus to fulfill a need, which could be freely used to fulfill it. Its commercial codebase was not valuable to anyone but the people who meant to work on it as an open-source project, and only because it could be picked-through, modified, even most of it scrapped if desired. This can be - and has been - done with software that descended from non-commercial codebases, because the motivation to create a polished product does not necessarily lie in a profit motive, and it definitely is not a product of some esoteric design homeopathy wherein that profit motive lies buried somewhere in Blender's code.
I think it's an insult to the hard work of the people who've produced the modern version of Blender that you insist on attributing the decisions they've made and implemented to some dedication to maintaining standards that did not exist for the product before they arrived.
What I will concede is that everything that has happened was necessary for Blender to be precisely what it is precisely at this moment, for better or worse. Including it's commercial history. I don't like that this conversation is becoming so contentious and I would suggest you think about what like concessions you can make to your counterargument before becoming married to a wholly antagonistic stance.
>and a commendable (though not unimpugnable) humility from developers who (finally) found the wherewithal to put the user experience before FOSS dogma or their own ambitions.
That's just what I was getting at when comparing Blender to GIMP in this other discussion:
>All of these ideas could be applied to Gimp too, of course, but I've found the Blender developers to be much more open to entertaining other people's ideas and contributions about user interface design than the Gimp developers, who have been historically NIH-limited and stubborn (especially about changing the name to something less offensive to the general public). At least Blender already supports pie menus well, and changed the default mouse bindings in response to user demand, and has made huge strides in usability lately. At this point I think it would be much easier to just add a great image editor to Blender, integrated with its video editor, than try to change the minds of the Gimp developers.
> That's what separates it from most [...] projects: [...] and worked diligently on creating a solid piece of software (and documentation and community and support) for a long, long time.
I'm starting to believe more and more that this is the essence to most things that look beautiful/simple/elegant.
What's I really love about it now is how deeply and sincerely it's integrated with Python. That didn't used to be the case originally, but I believe it happened kind of early on, so it's had a lot of time to mature, and there's all that RNA/DNA stuff to automate Python bindings. I'm working on learning more about that stuff myself! Do you know any more of the history, trials, and tribulations of that?
I do not, but thank you for bringing it up. The free extensibility of the core software is related to its Python integration and a major part of Blender's current success. Some essential add-ons have even become part of that core software over time.
It would definitely be nice to know more about that history, though.
