I dont know if anyone has seen Modo from Luxology, it’s scary that it has so many simularities to blender. eg. the look and feel seems to be very simuliar, http://www.luxology.com/modo/
someone told me that Modo is similar to Lightwave.
some people say Blender is similar to Lightwave (some say that is similar to XSI)
so, who knows.
Imho, Blender is a different animal to existing aplications.
no linux version tho 
Blender and Lightway are very similar… both on UI and to some extend on capabilities (of course LW has more capabilities, but the ones they have in common are almost indenticall).
Blender and LW are so similar, than whenever I find myself looking for a way to do certain thing, and I can’t find a Blender tutorial for that, I search a LW tutorial and usually everthing goes just fine.
Modo is developed by a group of people that used to work as LW developers, that’s why LW and Modo are so similar.
So A is similar to B, and B is similar to C… then A is also similar to C.