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Comment by 0815test | Hacker News Reader

> Well, then why does Blender need a development fund?

Why wouldn't they have such a fund? Sponsoring is a viable FLOSS business model, and it heavily overlaps with support (which is discussed in your quote from the blogpost).

The notion that "people" aren't "able to make money" with FLOSS is just a fallacy, and Blender itself is one of the clearest examples of how wrong it is - it was failing as a commercial prospect, and then got "rescued" or "ransomed out" as FLOSS via crowdfunding - one of the earliest crowdfunding initiatives I'm aware of, for that matter; well before there was anything like Kickstarter, Indiegogo etc.

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It is not a viable model.

How many people are actually paid by the Blender Foundation for their contributions to the software? How many fewer employees do they have than a company like Autodesk or Maxon?

The simple fact is that FLOSS is the outsourcing of large swathes of development cost to those stupid or interested enough to make something happen for free on their own time.

What do you do when that interest wanes?

You're fucked.

> What do you do when that interest wanes?

What do you do? You pay for support, plausibly via a crowdfunding-like mechanism - continued development and maintenance being something that's encompassed by "paid support", of course. What do you do when interest in a piece of proprietary software wanes and the original developer goes out of business altogether? Never mind, you answered that quite nicely already!

FLOSS is more viable than non-FLOSS in the long run. And we have solid empirical evidence of that, because we still have code from the 1970s and 1980s chugging along nicely as part of our modern Linux distributions. Try that with Windows 10, or even mac OS!

And yet, in the meantime...

> ... How many fewer employees do they [Blender Foundation] have than a company like Autodesk or Maxon?

...how is that supposed to be a bad thing, exactly? It's a lot like measuring the worth of a software project by the LOC of its source code, given a constant or even shrinking set of features.

How is the fact that there is old code in modern Linux distributions suddenly becoming empirical evidence on the viability of a business model? A business model does not become viable because you as the customer are somehow able to work on the project after it is no longer commercially available. By the way: there are a lot of commercial projects having escrow agreements to solve that problem without having to be open source.

I simply don't buy that we all should be living off donations to support our software development. It's utterly clear that only the biggest projects can pull that off, and even there — only to a certain degree, with some notable exceptions (RedHat, Linux).

> I simply don't buy that we all should be living off donations to support our software development.

Most "software development" is internal software that exists simply to solve some organization's bespoke issues, and is not open to the public - FLOSS vs. proprietary is a non-issue there. As far as off-the-shelf, non-internal stuff goes, software maintenance is actually a bigger issue than software development per se, and it's entirely appropriate to say "I will not be putting any effort into maintaining this unless you pay me some real $$$ for the trouble." So, I'm not even sure that we're disagreeing about anything of relevance - except inasmuch as "being able to work on the project - or to sponsor work on the project by third-parties - no matter what" is often very important!

> Most "software development" is internal software that exists simply to solve some organization's bespoke issues

Do you have a source for this?

> The notion that "people" aren't "able to make money" with FLOSS is just a fallacy

Which fallacy?

The one you quoted. Many people make money from open source software.

The comment they’re replying to said “I don't think it's a viable business model for all of us,” not that it’s not a viable model for any of us.

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