As a commercial product, it failed. We shouldn't say that being commercial is a model for success, Blender tried being commercial and it didn't work. If it had stayed commercial and had not been Open Sourced, it likely wouldn't exist today.

As a side effect of its origins and what people saw as the opportunity behind the project, it then got a lot of investment, and it turns out that Open Source projects with heavy involvement from their userbase (and not just from programmers) and with heavy monetary investments and a positive community that gets excited about the project -- it turns out that yields exceptional tools. But it's not the commercial aspect that caused that, the investments caused that, and other Open Source projects could be given the same level of investment -- after all, many of them are as good or as competitive (if not more competitive) than Blender was when it was Open Sourced.

As an Open Source program Blender has introduced architectural improvements and structural improvements that rival its origin, and it was able to do that without going commercial, which is evidence that this kind of investment and funding can exist for a non-commercial project if a significant portion of a community and businesses think the project is worth funding. It is arguable that starting out as a commercial project helped fuel that optimism. But to say Blender owes its success to being commercial feels backwards. Blender owes its success to the fact that it stopped being commercial, which was (and is) a contributing factor to why people and organizations feel so good donating to it. Like if we're going to take a lesson away from Blender, that lesson might be, "want to compete with Maya? Dissolve your company and give away your code."

I very much believe that Blender wouldn't have a community today if it had stuck with its commercial origins.

You're misunderstanding what my attempted explanation is about. You're arguing about reasons for Blender's success. That's not my angle.

My explanation is about something else: why Blender's level of polish (not "success") seems to be so advanced in relative comparison with other open source projects out there such as Gimp, etc.

In other words, people's expectations of open-source software usability/polish is so low that Blender's level of execution is surprising. This is the gp's particular wording I'm commenting on, >" I'm amazed at how professional and finished Blender is for being an open source project." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38262825)

The negative (usability) connotations with the phrase "for being an open source project" is something I've analyzed before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29605885

...all those open-source projects (Gimp, SageMath, etc) that are GUI instead of command-line that people complain of not having the polish of their peers -- don't have Blender's unique accidental history of having the (failed) commercial product kickstart the momentum and evangelism of a community to make subsequent Blender versions eventually exceed the expectations of typical open source projects. The multi-millions gave it a unusual headstart that Gimp, Octave, etc do not have.

I do agree with the following parts of your comment which don't contradict my argument:

>Blender owes its success to the fact that it stopped being commercial, which was (and is) a contributing factor to why people and organizations feel so good donating to it. [...] I very much believe that Blender wouldn't have a community today if it had stuck with its commercial origins.

I think the majority of Blender's polish came after being Open Sourced, and I don't think that movement was kickstarted by its origins. I do think its origins arguably played a role in its investment, but early Blender had a reputation of being exactly like many other Open Source projects -- powerful if you knew how to use it, but unpolished and arcane and difficult to learn.

When I first ran into the Blender, its interface was the biggest criticism I saw online about the project. Wherever the momentum came from to say "we could refactor this and make it attractive to regular modelers" I don't think that momentum was present in its early days or right after it was Open Sourced.

I'm tempted to dig into the history a bit more now, because I bet if I went back in HN history to the early 2.0 days, I would find comments saying that Blender is just like other Open Source projects in that its too confusing and difficult to use. The interface was what everyone trashed about Blender.

Of course investment helped with giving Blender the ability to undergo those kinds of radical transformations, but the transformations were sorely needed and I'm not sure that its UI was what fueled that investment. I think both overstate the connection, but I'm more sympathetic to a claim that Blender's commercial origins fueled its architecture or resources than I am to a claim that it fed its interface polish or excitement about its interface.

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Personally, I think the biggest contributor to Blender's interface is the fact that its community is made up of a ton of artists and not just programmers. Additionally, a lot of its investment is coming from studios -- notably not from a company catered to studios, but specifically from people who are using the tool in-house as they develop it. Greasepencil in particular is heavily influenced by this; the current rewrite for Greasepencil 3.0 is being pushed and developed by people who are intimately familiar with Greasepencil as a creative tool.

In theory, Open Source should be a much better match for this than commercial software, because commercial software caters to a client-base but is developed usually by a player outside of that space that is seeking to monetize it. Open Source often falls into the same trap, but at least has the possibility to be developed and driven and to have feature requests prioritized primarily by artists and community members who rely on the software rather than by a separate entity that is interested primarily in how the software is marketed or sold. That Open Source very often fails at this is (imo) more of a commentary on the lack of community experience and community investment that most projects have. Stereotypical GUI Open Source projects are very often the result of external efforts from people who are not trained in GUI work and who are not quite as closely tied to their users.

I'd bring up Krita as another example here -- Krita has no commercial origins (https://krita.org/en/about/krita-releases-overview/) but is miles ahead of Gimp in terms of building a polished interface that caters to artists. One immediately obvious difference is that Krita's artist community is heavily engaged in the project and in regular communication with the developers and regularly gets involved in feature development and prototyping and testing. <incorrect, see correction below>In fact, Krita started out as a fork of Gimp, and yet has surpassed Gimp in terms of ease of use and polish.</incorrect>

"I think this is because plugins are made for people to pay attention to them and then buy more plugins. I just do patreon, so I make plugins to be used, and only by those who need them. They should be boring and never change, but the sound should be amazing and just immediately there so you can pay attention to the music, not the plugin, and then not have to buy more."

That's the secret to open source software if we choose to maintain it. There's a catch: OSS projects also gain mindshare through promotion and attention, putting them on exactly the same grounds as commercial software, and if you had an ideal project that perfectly met a need without drawing any attention to itself, that need would prosper and the OSS project would languish.

It's the old 'tiny piece of unsupported OSS software on which the world depends' problem. You absolutely can do that and the cost is that the project either languishes or fails (in the sense that it can't be maintained, not that it fails its task). Or you can lean towards seeking payback, in the form of money or in the form of attention, and it costs the users something but sustains the project more fully.

The next substantial investment was a €1.2M grant in 2019, and it was a direct result of the development of 2.80, both the new GUI and other improvements. It suddenly became an actual viable alternative to commercial products, making it worth investing in. These developments only happened due to the hard work of mostly volunteers, and a lot of donations from primarily the community.

It did not, because Blender went 7+ years without substantial improvements to its modeling and rendering tools and interface. It was a zombie, with a lot of resources wasted on the now-defunct game engine. The pivot away from what it had been is what made Blender what it is today.

>crote: Just because they shoveled a lot of money into it, doesn't mean they actually created a great product.

I'm citing these 2 comments because it's another example of mentioning observations that can be true -- but are still not a good explanation of _why_ Blender's level of polish is different from other open-source projects.

You guys are emphasizing the artifacts of the software as the proof of Blender's unique situation. Instead of the artifacts, I'm emphasizing the _community_ and _why_ they're invested in Blender to motivate the work on the subsequent artifacts (e.g. revamped UI) that you're referring to. The explanation of the community momentum starts from the business investment. In this framing, it doesn't matter that Blender v2003 wasn't great software. What matters is that v2003 (with whatever flaws) -- attracted enough community -- to keep working on it (and eventually "pivoting") for 20 years.

I go back to this you claimed as the key reason :

>yterdy: , but because its designers and developers stowed their egos and worked diligently on creating a solid piece of software

That would be a more convincing argument if the developers used the 2002 crowdsource money to build a clean-room rewrite from scratch instead of buying the existing codebase to get the millions in sunk development work at a steep discount. E.g., if what truly matters is the humble developer egos rather than the value of the exiting codebase, then there was no need to buy the old codebase. Just advertise the 2002 crowdsource money as paying for humble diligent developers to build a new 3D modeler from scratch. But that's not what happened. Both the crowdfunders and the original developers wanted that old codebase that was already paid for by business investments as a starting point. Even though the later v2.5 was a big rewrite, that doesn't change how the community thought of the v2002 software. It already has the interest level and evangelism to attract future work leading to the 2.5 rewrite.

If Blender was "zombie" software, _why_ were people working on "bad software" to make it better? Work backwards from that. Consider the motivations and interests. Saying "Blender v2003 wasn't great" doesn't really explain things.

Again, an emphatic, "No." Blender's massive improvements in the early-to-mid 2010s are what brought investment from outside sources, not the other way around. It was an artifact around which interested parties could rally; that says nothing of its value as an executable piece of software, but rather its value as a focus to fulfill a need, which could be freely used to fulfill it. Its commercial codebase was not valuable to anyone but the people who meant to work on it as an open-source project, and only because it could be picked-through, modified, even most of it scrapped if desired. This can be - and has been - done with software that descended from non-commercial codebases, because the motivation to create a polished product does not necessarily lie in a profit motive, and it definitely is not a product of some esoteric design homeopathy wherein that profit motive lies buried somewhere in Blender's code.

I think it's an insult to the hard work of the people who've produced the modern version of Blender that you insist on attributing the decisions they've made and implemented to some dedication to maintaining standards that did not exist for the product before they arrived.

What I will concede is that everything that has happened was necessary for Blender to be precisely what it is precisely at this moment, for better or worse. Including it's commercial history. I don't like that this conversation is becoming so contentious and I would suggest you think about what like concessions you can make to your counterargument before becoming married to a wholly antagonistic stance.