Comment by inflatableDodo

6 years ago

>But nobody is going to. Because it makes no business sense to do so.

I've got Blender open on my desktop. Could you explain the business sense behind Blender exisiting?

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inflatableDodo

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snlacks  6 years ago

Interest? Very few people care to build medical billing software or crms for free in their spare time. So you get products that aren't as good. Even with blender, there's far better paid tools because people need money to live, so they put their efforts into things that make money.

  • thedaemon  6 years ago

    Blender Institute, the main source of programmers of Blender, is a non-profit organization that pays people real money. As a user of 3D software, your statement about "far better paid tools" is inaccurate this day and age.

  • pbhjpbhj  6 years ago

    I thought blender was used by commercial producers (3D modelling, animation, NLE), if there are better things, for them, then why do they use blender?

    You might say "price" but then that's part of being better "better excluding financial considerations" is quite a different notion.

    • snlacks  6 years ago

      Companies weigh the benefit of open source for their needs against non open source products.

      A limited list of reasons they may use it include available talent (people often learn on free stuff), availability of support and consultants locally or at their price, specfic features of one tool need or not needed, availability of developers to contribute/fix bugs, desire to have input handled openly and open governed. They prefer the UI or APIs. Flexibility to integrate more openly. Desire to make a statement in support of FOSS or specific project.

      Reasons why they may not us FOSS, liability (someone to blame if there's an issue, spread insurance costs), privacy when dealing with issues, availability of consultants or training at the desired price, availability of talent (many people learn paid software at school), availability of managed server farms. They prefer the UI or APIs. Available APIs that have simple integrations. Etc.

rglullis  6 years ago

Companies/Content producers that do not want to depend on a single vendor, or want to avoid the lock-in, and went on to support an open alternative?

Makes perfect business sense.

  • inflatableDodo  6 years ago

    Well, they open sourced it as a bit of a gamble when it became apparent that they couldn't afford the programmers to run it profitably as a business, but if I squint I can see where you are coming from. OK, here's a harder one. Explain the business case for TempleOS.

    • rglullis  6 years ago

      TempleOS was never a business, and it never was significant part of any kind of software market and completely irrelevant in terms of economic value.

      I guess you are hung up on the fact that OP used hyperbole to say that "nobody" is going to focus on local-first software and you are trying to win an argument by taking this statement literally.

      Can we be a little bit more charitable here, and actually argue the point of OP? Even though I am a die-hard Linux-on-desktop, Thunderbird-for-gmail, SaaS-averse gray-hairing dude who still is bent on spending countless nights and weekends setting up my own self-hosted services on my own bare-metal servers, I totally understand that the growing of SaaS-companies are due to economic reasons, not technical ones.

      It is not like people are going around saying "Gee, I made this software here and I wish people could run on their computers, but they can't so I will have to create a startup business that runs this software on the internet and I will collect subscriptions as a way to fund the operation".

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