It was more about the impossibility you mentioned… if some studio want to have this then the management is very happy “rely” on something what they have pasi for… even if you can download it for free.
Anyway: some bigger studios/cooperations do already “advertise” themself by being a “bigger” supporter.
On the other hand even “industry standard” apps like Z-Brush or known ones like Modo were properly sold/stopped because they had what? Financial problems ??
So in this regard blender does work very well. And maybe the BF should think about the possibility to offer dual licensed version… because as mentioned someone the management pay for is a business partner if they do not pay then they also can not rely on anything.
People who have no intention of paying for stuff will figure out where to download anything from. Adobe Cloud? Maya? Houdini? No problem whatsoever.
The idea would be that the Blender Foundation adds a $5 fee to downloading Blender, and while a certain percentage of users would opt not to pay and instead find it somewhere else, another percentage (like me for example) would be more motivated to just part with the price of a bag of potato chips and download from Blender.org.
Once again, I’m not saying they need to do that, but if the current path is unsustainable financially, and it leads to Blender being EOL in a few years…I’d prefer that they start charging.
a $5 download barrier for GPL software sounds a bit silly though.
it would be better to improve their compaign communication and tell more directly how much money they need for speeding up development of what. a first goal could be reaching 10000 individual members for the fund.
It’s all fundamentally silly, in the sense that once you have gotten people used to get something for free, it becomes really difficult to get them to pay for it again.
I’m watching the slow moving train wreck that is Quixel/Unreal/Fab to see how that unfolds…my guess is not well.
Though Blender.org is not the only place to get Blender, a fee would only make a major impact if they could legally ban other sites from uploading compiled builds for free.
Keep in mind that the GPL’s copyleft is so strong that Blender is not even allowed to have closed-sourced plugins or deeply interface with closed-source libraries (which is why we will never have things like Vray export, FBX export, or GoZ in a sustainable and fully reliable manner). You can even download the Blender Market addons for free (as the license does not allow them to have anything better than an honor system).
This also assumes that a splinter group within the community does not decide the BF has gone too corporate and rebrands Blender as a new project called Mixer (though BForArtists finally becoming a hard fork is the most likely).
