this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
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It’s a double-edged sword. The ease-of-use benefits of centralization outweigh the independence of open-source for most people. Without leadership or centralization of open-source, there will always be too many distros to choose from. Obviously, centralization of open-source software is self-negating, and not a realistic idea.
Blender Foundation I think has perfectly balanced the quality that comes from a centrally managed project with the community and adaptability of its open source nature and the support of the community.
They have a managed hub where a lot of fantastic community plug-ins reside but just as many high quality plug-ins are hosted elsewhere. They also do their best to bring in exceptional talent from the community officially into the Foundation like the hiring of the old Animation Nodes plug-in creator to work on Grometry Nodes and revamp all the other node based workflows in Blender.
If that model were applied to Linux distros, I bet we’d see a larger adoption of the OS.
Blender also has a huge benefit of a very active group of donors and a lot of support from the Netherlands government. Major industry organizations like Ubisoft and Epic Games have made significant monetary contributions in recent years to the Blender Foundation because they're more closely integrating Blender into their creative and technical pipelines
It's peobably cheaper to develop in-house plugins for than for Cinema4D and related tools.
Possibly, I know that in the current state kf the industry, Autodesk and Maxon in the last 5-10 years have gotten exceptionally stagnant in the development of truly new game changing stuff and are now looking at Blender and copying what is going on there. Blender really is leading the way with new tech and new tools that others are copying them instead of the other way around. And Blender has been doing a lot to make sure it can fit into basically any pipeline.
And it being OS makes it impossible to be stagnant. Just merge a new PR if someone was bored and chose to develop a new feature.
Win-Win for community and developers. thumbs-up
Most advanced software has a learning curve. People who have invested a bunch of time and energy learning Walled Garden OS will find other Walled Garden apps easier to use than folks who grew up in the open-source wilds.
That is a big reason why big OS companies (Microsoft most notoriously) practically give their software away to college kids and junior developers. Gates was even quoted saying something to the effect of "I'd prefer software pirates steal Microsoft Windows today than use a competitor tomorrow"