For those of us in the “developed” world, 5 euro a month is nothing - which is the minimum recurring donation to the Blender Foundation. If Blender gives you 5 euro or more entertainment or enjoyment per month (cost of 1 or 2 pints of beer a month a London!), then why wouldn’t you donate? Sky TV to watch Premiership football is like 35 euro a month to those in the UK and you don’t even get any improvements back for your money unless you like ever more badly behaved celebrity footballers.
Blender does a lot of altruistic good in the world. In a lot of countries not as lucky to be in the high GDP range, how hard would it be to get into 3D art/vfx/animation/archviz for fun or a career if there was no software affordable to you to even develop skills and practice? Why should any art medium or any career be available to privileged few?
Okay, so the core developers are paid, but bear in mind that someone like Ton could be getting 6-figure salary with share options at a commercial 3D software house (don’t tell him, he might not know!) - he’s a director-level manager with deep technical know-how and experience in a very specialised field. Where I work you should see what they pay random guys off “director street” who know nothing other than how to talk BS. I know how hard it is to get good developers just for something much more common and simple like SQL or C#, let alone in something so technically and mathematically hard as Blender - don’t doubt that the developers are making sacrifices here, and also get a lot of crap for it. I was stunned the BlenderCookie guys got trolled for releasing a paid add-on (which in itself would be fine anyway) and they even made it open-source! Let’s face it, they could be writing Maya or 3DSMax plug-ins if they cared about the $$$.
Luckily for all of us, all the really important stuff we take for granted about the Internet and free software managed to develop under-the-radar of governments and multi-national companies before they could stop it - we have to protect this now it is here from anything that threatens it whenever self-interest raises it’s ugly head (for example - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23558865). So I urge all of you that can afford it to financially support whatever “free” (as in freedom) projects that you identify with and appreciate, be it some OSS like Blender or EFF, Amnesty ,Wikipedia whatever.
Thank you all for listening, I’ll get back in my box