every time something stupid happens like this Unity debacle, I get even more impressed about Blender. That shit is more free than air and at least as good as its competitors. I hope Godot or something like it keeps getting better and becomes the Blender of game engines~~~~
but the circumstances around the birth, death, and rebirth of blender were pretty sui generis: a company made it as a line of business tool (i.e., a tool that they used to do other work and didn't intend to be a product) and released it as proprietary freeware, then when the company went bankrupt it got spun out into a proprietary shareware product. then, when that company went bankrupt, it went into maintenance mode until the lead developer crowdfunded the purchase of its IP rights off of the creditors who ended up with them, then rereleased it as open source. in this shuffle, a lot of people lost money (but those people were investors, so it's hard to feel too bad.)
open-source software has been around for decades and unfortunately there are still very few reliable business models to produce it on an ongoing basis beyond:
- be a huge proprietary software company and cynically use it as an implement of soft power;
- barely survive off of voluntary donations for An Indefinite While
I'm hopeful that tools like Godot can continue to find money to grow and professionalize their development teams, instead of having to get by on volunteer labor! but it's still an unpaved trail out there, unfortunately
- Be Donald Knuth and make TeX
The problem here is that be'sing Donald Knuth or Bram Molenaar (RIP) or whoever are all jobs that are already taken
