Blender is the epic example of free software slowly eventually eating the big proprietary guys' lunch. Volunteers spending countless hours writing software, because they were fed up with the very high pricing point of the alternatives (Maya, 3DS). Now hopefully they can kick off the eating of large internet incumbents like Youtube, maybe using some decentralized free video sharing like PeerTube. I love watching blender tutorials. I hope this creates more competition in this space (online video hosting).
Remember that Blender started as proprietary software created by a Dutch company. The software was close source from its inception until 2002 when the parent company went bankrupt and the creator started a crowdfunding campaign to buy and open the source from the holding company's liquidation sale.
Yes, and then it was able to start slowly taking over the world. I see the value of a proprietary cash-fueled kick start, but it wasn't the driving factor in blender's adoption, and other projects show it's clearly not necessary in the general case.
I'm just pointing out it was originally proprietary and that's where it built a reputation that made it worth opening and supporting. Software doesn't know if it's proprietarily licensed or not. Great ideas are only GPL. OSS is great, but it doesn't mean proprietary software is bad or evil.
Yeah I watched an interview. It was cool how he says most of the major modeller refactors, and other very important code contributions were donated by volunteers.
Blender is actually my favorite example of a beautifully made, professional-level OSS tool. The way the interface renders, the way the interface is thought out -- it's truly a pleasure to use. Given the Python backend interface and graphics/game engine, I've considered using it for completely unrelated projects -- I could see it being used for video/display jockeying, or aerial survey flight control, for example.
I really hope we will be looking back at this moment in 3 years or whatever as the beginning of something big. We are long overdue to "myspacifiy" some of the current regents of the web.
