How can OpenSource stand up to the money? I always read some bad posts about Blender on YouTube. Blender can’t do this, why can’t Blender do that. Blender is junk etc. Why do these people just don’t get that they can join OpenSource?
OpenSource is not meant to satisfy anyone completely, especially if the programmers do it in their spare time with a lot of passion. OpenSource must become more robust against these enemies!
Money is not the main reason why OpenSource exists! WallStreet can stay outside.
Because they make money by making some content and get paid by the amount of clicks not the quality. And if you have those shocked faces on the video thumbnail then they get more clicks and then they are awarded by the algorithm and get proposed and get more clicks and… (and now i’m lost in and endless loop).
Or: don’t educate yourself on YT (only or at first)… (mastering any software in 3 min… the must haves for 2022…)
Notice the sponsors you see for the vast majority of successful FOSS projects. Like it or not, Wall Sreet (and capitalism in general) is a major contributor to the power we can enjoy for free today. In fact, many of the FOSS projects that remain on a pure idealism path are the ones that are still just for hobbies or for smaller tasks (with the only exception being more specialized projects).
The “Just join the open source project if it’s missing something” type responses to people’s frustrations ignore two important things: 1) Most artists are not professional programmers. If they could just code the thing into the software themselves, of course they would! 2) If it were easy for one person to implement someone probably would have.
The actual problem is that people look at highly specialized software designed to be the best in their niche and then compare Blender, a generalist software to that. It’s not worse at sculpting than Zbrush because it’s open source, but because Zbrush’s team is bigger and almost solely focused on sculpting, and it’s been developed more intensely longer. Why can’t Blender be Zbrush, Substance Painter, Marvelous Designer, Houdini, and Unreal Engine 5 all in one? Becase it doesn’t have multiple companies worth of developers, and if it did, they’d have to keep each team’s complex code playing nicely. Why is Unreal better than Eevee? Bigger staff, and engine has been developed longer.
Blender’s great, but because it can do a little of everything, it can’t compete with specialized software in every niche. Sure MD has better cloth sims, but it can’t sculpt like Zbrush either. Can’t scupt characters at all there, actually.
“Open source” is better described as "cooperative development." The costs of developing and maintaining computer software are actually hideous. So, instead of “trying to build our own [spreadsheet program] and building legal walls around it,” we do the opposite: we cooperate, having first built a legally-tested licensing framework which guarantees that no one can “build a wall” in the future.
This strategy has proved to be enormously successful. It has produced the “Mach” kernel which lies at the foundation of every Macintosh; the “Linux” operating system and “GNU” in its entirety; the foundations of the Android mobile-phone OS; OpenOffice; MuseScore; Blender (of course); SSL/TLS; MySQL and SQLite; the Firefox browser; “the list goes on and on.”None of these initiatives would have been economically possible otherwise. “A rising tide lifts all boats.”
The legality of agreements like “GPL” have been tested in international courts, and convictions have been handed down for violating them. “This is Real Law.”
Open Source elegantly solved a serious problem: “Everyone needs a common foundation, but no one can afford to build one, and then maintain it using only his proprietary revenue stream. We’ve got to solve this problem!”
P.S.: The “F” in “FOSS” is a misnomer. "Nothing’s Free." Salaries must be paid, but there are many creative ways to do that if you think outside the box. (Keep donating to the Blender Foundation …)
Freedom to tinker. That allowed Google to make Chrome, and Apple to make Safari, because KHTML from KDE and Konqueror folks was open source, free for also the companies to modify and ship. Back then they probably would not have made a browser from scratch, but thanks to the OS base it was kinda easy. I read the KHTML patches that Apple sent when they announced Safari, was a crazy amount of great work, that allowed Google then to use it for Chrome later.
I jumped from 3D MAX to Blender many, maaany moons ago, when Blender was, honestly, kind of a joke. Crappy UI, limited features, nothing to really show off its abilities. I looked because it was free, which was really weird at the time, but I stayed because people were more engaging, more of a community. Then, it took off. Features added, bam bam bam. Elephant’s Dream, Sintel, Big Buck, bam bam bam. Open Source software is a wild ride, and not for anyone. But once an OS software takes off, it becomes something unlike anything else. Look at Minecraft. No, it’s not OS, but it exploded because of modding communities. Suddenly, this dumb little game had competitive spleefing (a ‘sport’ of hacking away snow underneath players to make them fall to their deaths), you had parkour maps, adventure maps, machinima, a jungle of things. It came form the same place as OS, meaning people finding a way to tinker and just going nuts. THAT is what drives any good OS, not just the features or money (or lack thereof), but how the software itself becomes a living thing, a wild jungle ride that takes you by surprise. And where propriety software follows a narrow company outline, OS can change on a dime, with some random person throwing a weird idea into the gears and just leaving, then others just run with it. Wanna see how OS changes? Search for pics from pre-UI update Blender (pre 2.0?), if you can find any. It’s a different beast entirely. Open Source expands and grows in ways PS cannot. IT’S ALIIIIVE!!!
I want Open Source versions of everything. Game Engines, office packs, VR design, you name it. I still hope some day soon to finance / create my Open Source fictional universe. One day… one day…
I think that we would not now have most of the technical toys that we now enjoy were it not for open-source cooperative development of key technologies. The entirety(!) of Linux, the GNU library, the Mach UNIX kernel, the TLS/SSL that “puts the lock on” this website, open networking stacks, and on and on.
Before this idea took hold and was perfected, many a worthy piece of software “died on the vine,” not because they couldn’t make the technology work, but because they couldn’t make the numbers work.
It’s basically “financially impossible” to build a software business based on “ticket sales.” You’re all being forced to do – and to pay for – redundant effort which inevitably won’t be compatible with the next guy’s also-redundant effort. Therefore, “cooperation is the only thing that makes financial and technical sense,” and legally-tested open source copyright license agreements are the secret sauce for making this work. Many major corporations invest millions of dollars into such projects every year. This official sponsorship pays indirect benefits that are easily justified, and open-source licenses protect them all at once.
The Linux® operating system, for instance, runs on well more than twenty different platforms – literally, “from mainframe to mobile.” No single company could do that or afford to that, but many cooperating companies (including Microsoft …) can. So, if you’ve got a hardware/software project in mind, Linux is very likely to be at the heart of it. And – once you perfect your method of putting Linux in this particular environment, you share it. That’s the key. Now the next guy doesn’t have to do it too. Instead, he finds some cool improvement to your work that you didn’t think of, and he shares it back with you.
Commercial software is based on “trend” and “niche” concepts in order to succeed. Only the most innovative idea wins. Open source concept is based on the “common concensus” of the technical community. Only the most effective and efficient wins.
Also the other case is that a commercial product supposed to be succesful in order to produce earnings for the company. The open source product must supposed to be effective and efficient in order to withstand degradation and abandonment.
These are two different worlds and the core principles are opposites. Though the ideal case is that some companies managed to create a good balance between having open source software and commercial support services. Perhaps getting the best of both worlds.
Good points. “Open Source” also includes an entire segment which might be called, “core technologies.” These are the building-blocks in the foundation of the house … which happen to be needed in every house, and needed to be compatible and to work the same way everywhere. By far the easiest way to assure compatibility is if “the software which produced the data on platform X” is (!!) “the software that is now reading it on platform Y.” Everybody’s computer has a “binary-library directory” somewhere, filled with things that software depends on, and a great deal of that material is open-source.
Open source licenses make it possible for companies to contribute to the mutual development of those technologies, since they are assured that no one can put a fence up, and “a rising tide lifts all boats.”
Keep making those nice tax-deductible contributions to the Blender Foundation!
So, instead of “trying to build our own [spreadsheet program] and building legal walls around it,” we do the opposite: we 