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Comment by tracerbulletx | Hacker News Reader

I love Blender so much. A true success story for Open Software.

Honestly I think a lot of it comes down to Ton being the right personality for leadership in that community. I know of various tech and art people that bounced off Blender over the years because of justified problems with it at different times, but Ton didn't let that become a terminal problem and steadily iterated the whole thing to get it to where it is today. It's great to see this being far more widely appreciated than even ten years ago.

Counterpoint: Ton is also one of the biggest reasons companies and individuals struggle to contribute bigger things to Blender. He’s very difficult to work with, and will quite often say really inflammatory things in other open source communities when he doesn’t understand them.

A lot of the Blender redesign and big features is the community pushing over years to say: “this is what we need” and being shot down till someone finally breaks through. Many features stay in forks for ages because they get blanket statements turning it down until they’ve amassed enough hype in the community. See grease pencil and the 2.8+ redesign.

I would give the most credit these days to the folks around him who are more willing to listen to the community and work directly with them.

The funding model is fantastic. They probably have more developers than the commercial competition. They've been helping Krita in setting up a similar ecosystem

where can I learn about the funding model?

The Blender Fund's website[0] gives some good background, and has a list of members and corporate sponsors.

[0] https://fund.blender.org/

Yes, and this page [1] has a nice big-picture graphic showing where money comes from and where it goes.

Not directly mentioned there is the income they get from selling merch in their store [2]. I guess it's small compared to their other sources of income.

[1] https://www.blender.org/about/

[2] https://store.blender.org/

Ironically started as a proprietary software. The community had to buy back the rights for the source code to open source it.

It was a wonderful example of crowdfunding. I wonder what other software area might benefit from a similar Foss injection. A few years ago they overwrote the last of the original code.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was in the top 10 of FOSS history

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