Also some extreme ups and downs along the way, almost succumbing at some point(s) and more along the way. It's a miracle it survived, a miracle performed by Ton Roosendaal most likely.
There are still some areas where commercial competitors got edge, but Blender covers a wider base, is the more complete/universal software already. Lot's of people prefer Blender's UI. It's also rapidly developing, the competition is not. I am pretty sure it will become industry standard at some point. Maybe not for the big studios, who invested millions into custom pipelines, but anything up and coming.
Role model FOSS project for sure.
I remember people saying this in 2004.
Blender is widely used in "the industry" (whatever that industry is). What is has really accomplished in terms of "the industry standard" has, from my POV, been preventing a proprietary system from becoming the standard. That's what happened in the DAW space, where ProTools was the industry standard, and it has taken 20 years to get to the point where that hegemony is no longer as solid as it once was (thanks, Ableton!)
There are several different choices for all the things Blender does, but the existence of a FLOSS tool that does them (and does them well) prevents any of the proprietary ones from being "the one".
I had the movie industry in mind, because it demands the largest set of Blender's features. I believe Maya still has/had the edge in animation and particle stuff. Though, AFAIK the main reason is integration and custom tooling built on it, which makes switching to Blender less tempting than sticking up with license fees... which are rather negligible compared to overall operating costs.
I believe, Blender is creeping in with smaller studios, especially anime/cartoon kinda stuff.
I think one of Blender's biggest assets is its wide creative tool set. There is even a useful video editor included. Honestly, it's not far off from being the swiss army knife of digital creative work, a creative operating system. Maybe we get a DAW too at some point :D Anyway, I think that's why Blender will dominate. Anyone starting out got everything they need for "free" (with a consistent UI you only have to learn once), but they still won't outgrow the software professionally either, now. That's totally unique.
Imagine if they made Gimp good, this would be what blender became in 3D.
They've done it right, with a foundation and it appears to run like clockwork. Feature wise it now rivals with some pretty expensive alternatives.
Open source; can win!
It is also free. =3
I have a vague recollection that twenty years ago GIMP paid some designers to come up with a great UI, but once the design was ready, GIMP was like "nah we don't like that" and kept their bad UI.
I do image stuff so rarely that GIMP is fine because it's free. But its UI is so bad. I don't know about now, but I remember a few years ago someone pointed out that GIMP had over a million dollars in a Bitcoin wallet and hadn't touched any of it in like a decade.
Gimp still has a lot of good features that I find myself crawling back for, on bigger projects. But Pinta has that good ol' fashioned Paint.NET feel to it that a lot of people still strive for.
That is 1000 proof pure distilled sarcasm.