this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025
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More and more I'm starting to see users of completely free and community-run open source projects expecting the same level of polish and customer service as proprietary commercial software, doing nothing to support or contribute to development while only complaining about how horrible they are when they are not able to do that. Then they switch to proprietary software, and when corporate enshitification happens to that software, they proceed to wonder why open source projects are all dying and corporate software vendors are getting more brazen in their shitty business practices due to not having serious open source competitors anymore. It's whatever when individual people do it with software on their personal computers, but when the businesses that use it as core components of their stack basically have the same only take and never give attitude, is it any wonder that open source is struggling?
Hot take: when I first got into open source, I turned my nose up at the licenses that restrict large scale commercial use just like everyone else. Open Source Foundation sure hates them and refuses to even consider them open source. But as I understand the software industry better, I'm starting to come around to them. If you're a company whose profits are over some threshold and you make that money through the use of open source software, why shouldn't you have to give back to it? I think it's not unreasonable that if you're a billion dollar company running your entire computer infrastructure on open source projects, you should be required to contribute a small percentage of your profits to their continued development. Said software obviously brought you a ton of value so why shouldn't you be expected to give back even a fraction of that value?
I'm confident Autodesk wouldn't have introduced indie pricing if it weren't for Blender's rise in popularity. Competition is good for everyone (except a company like Autodesk trying to get the highest returns for the least effort).
Gonna call you out on this, at least partially. It was SideFX, a real threat of a proprietary vendor who has sizable market share in 3D/VFX, releasing an entirely perpetually free learning edition and a low cost indie license who put the screws on Autodesk. Blender contributed to the decision, but it was absolutely not the primary pressure source.
Source: I have a Masters Degree in VFX, have studied the industry for over 35 years, and have worked professionally in it for going on 15.
I respectfully disagree. While true that Houdini was one of the first visual effects softwares offering an indie license, it was by no means the only one. Substance comes to mind, before the Adobe acquisition.
The timeline is also unconvincing: a considerable number of years elapsed after Houdini entered the market and Autodesk/Maya offered an indie license. However, is does coincide with better blender documentation and rise in YT content that rapidly grew the blender community.
Houdini can do more than FX, sure, and I've consistently heard nothing but good things, but its professional use remains relatively [edit: departmentally] niche. So, it may seem to someone in the niche of FX that Maya is losing ground to Houdini, but on a macro level Blender has the features and price point to threaten a larger portion of Autodesk/Maya's market share. In lieu of better data, I'll refer to google trends of the three softwares in which Houdini is a flat line at the bottom. I will gladly consider data to the contrary if you have it.
Either way, my main point was that competition is good, and who is responsible for how much doesn't change that.