Hacker News Reader

Comment by devwastaken | Hacker News Reader

It's not as if adobe is a singular person whom makes strategic decisions on what projects the company donates to. Someone in the company wants to donate to blender foundation, so they do. Case closed.

An exec at John Deere donated 500,000 to a 501c3 (non lobbying) for right to repair, which John deer the company matched. Doesn't mean the company is going to be supporting it anytime soon.

If we want to get into hypotheticals, it's within adobies line of products to get into 3D. Maybe they want to look into copy+pasting blender for their product line.

View on HN

> An exec at John Deere donated 500,000 to a 501c3 (non lobbying) for right to repair, which John deer the company matched.

This is much like Mark Zuckerberg's donation to Diaspora [1], the decentralized and open source social network. It's a token donation to the opposition that isn't really viewed as a substantial threat. It can be pointed to internally and externally as a fig leaf, but it doesn't yield any strategic edge. It's cheap posturing, and it works.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2010/05/zuckerberg-interview/

Similarly, the Microsoft investment in Apple way back when. Both are doing well today and MS is probably healthier for the competition.

There can also be some "the enemy of my enemy" involved. Does Adobe even have any products that compete with Blender? Other companies have, and they might also have products that compete with Adobe.

Blender has an NLE. It is the most recommended free video editor right now. Definitely could eat into Premiere Pro/AE

Blender's video editor is good now? I mean, it's always worked, but I would never have described it as good. (Haven't used it since before 2.8 though)

Thinking paid plugins is the likely route, they could easily leverage their large library of 3d assets (shaders/models/rigged customizable characters)

Yeah, Adobe has been pushing into the stock photo space for a while now.

They sell 3d assets and that portion of the company probably doesn't care what you use them in. Besides if they get you buying assets from them it is another channel to sell on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com