More and more I’m starting to see users of completely free and community-run open source projects expecting the same level of polish and customer service as proprietary commercial software, doing nothing to support or contribute to development while only complaining about how horrible they are when they are not able to do that. Then they switch to proprietary software, and when corporate enshitification happens to that software, they proceed to wonder why open source projects are all dying and corporate software vendors are getting more brazen in their shitty business practices due to not having serious open source competitors anymore. It’s whatever when individual people do it with software on their personal computers, but when the businesses that use it as core components of their stack basically have the same only take and never give attitude, is it any wonder that open source is struggling?
Hot take: when I first got into open source, I turned my nose up at the licenses that restrict large scale commercial use just like everyone else. Open Source Foundation sure hates them and refuses to even consider them open source. But as I understand the software industry better, I’m starting to come around to them. If you’re a company whose profits are over some threshold and you make that money through the use of open source software, why shouldn’t you have to give back to it? I think it’s not unreasonable that if you’re a billion dollar company running your entire computer infrastructure on open source projects, you should be required to contribute a small percentage of your profits to their continued development. Said software obviously brought you a ton of value so why shouldn’t you be expected to give back even a fraction of that value?
For completion, this is what the GNU GPL license encourages : it makes it so someone can’t sell their software without also providing the source, in the event they used your GPL-licensed library. It’s the good kind of trickle-down
I’m confident Autodesk wouldn’t have introduced indie pricing if it weren’t for Blender’s rise in popularity. Competition is good for everyone (except a company like Autodesk trying to get the highest returns for the least effort).
Gonna call you out on this, at least partially. It was SideFX, a real threat of a proprietary vendor who has sizable market share in 3D/VFX, releasing an entirely perpetually free learning edition and a low cost indie license who put the screws on Autodesk. Blender contributed to the decision, but it was absolutely not the primary pressure source.
Source: I have a Masters Degree in VFX, have studied the industry for over 35 years, and have worked professionally in it for going on 15.
I respectfully disagree. While true that Houdini was one of the first visual effects softwares offering an indie license, it was by no means the only one. Substance comes to mind, before the Adobe acquisition.
The timeline is also unconvincing: a considerable number of years elapsed after Houdini entered the market and Autodesk/Maya offered an indie license. However, is does coincide with better blender documentation and rise in YT content that rapidly grew the blender community.
Houdini can do more than FX, sure, and I’ve consistently heard nothing but good things, but its professional use remains relatively [edit: departmentally] niche. So, it may seem to someone in the niche of FX that Maya is losing ground to Houdini, but on a macro level Blender has the features and price point to threaten a larger portion of Autodesk/Maya’s market share. In lieu of better data, I’ll refer to google trends of the three softwares in which Houdini is a flat line at the bottom. I will gladly consider data to the contrary if you have it.
Either way, my main point was that competition is good, and who is responsible for how much doesn’t change that.
3d studio was notoriously hard to crack (click 30 consecutive times on the left side of the screen and your IK gets wrecked - hard) but became easy when they understood that students and poors learning the soft was a winning idea.
I remember it was possible to buy fully functional 3d studio max 4 copies at the flea market in 2003 or so. They came with an easy to use license keygen (or so I’m told).
Cracked soft back in the day often came with some manifesto or text from the guy/team that hacked it. My 3dsmax like in 1995 explained all the loopholes they closed to make it working, and one was that if the soft detected it was cracked, and it detected 30 consecutive mouse clicks exclusively on the left part of the screen, it wrecked your IK, inverse kinematics, used to animate walking and such.
This was to make the soft unusable, and hard to figure out how to crack it correctly.
Hahahah that’s so utterly specific. One of our Maya installs was broken in such a way that activating the move tool overlaid your viewport with a red tint, the rotation tool gave you a green tint and the scale tool, you guessed it, a blue tint. Since you tend to switch those tools often, especially as an animator, this was a nightmare. Not cracking related but still
A skightly different view, but when I started a lot of companies did give back. I have worked with, hired, managed and led at least a half dozen teams with the explicit mission to make an already existing open source project do what we want by contributing functionality upstream, or by forking the project. I actually wrote a “open source engineering management” curriculum back when I was still teaching.
Unfortunately these efforts often sttuggle in a similar way - some developer who is not affiliated with us starts creating friction, and blowing up internal schedules, sometimes seemingly on purpose. Management starts to ask why so many of our features are dependent on SkankTopia6969 approving PRs and awkward conversations ensue. And then the project slowly becomes the process of educating an increasingly detached internal hierarchy on the realities of open source development, and people inevitability start asking why this is even in-house tooling in the first place.
Despite that, I’ve fielded a bunch of products like this, though always at fairly small scale (like $10M/yr revenue). The only time I’ve really done it big league the project got canned during a technical reorg.
More and more I’m starting to see users of completely free and community-run open source projects expecting the same level of polish and customer service as proprietary commercial software, doing nothing to support or contribute to development while only complaining about how horrible they are when they are not able to do that. Then they switch to proprietary software, and when corporate enshitification happens to that software, they proceed to wonder why open source projects are all dying and corporate software vendors are getting more brazen in their shitty business practices due to not having serious open source competitors anymore. It’s whatever when individual people do it with software on their personal computers, but when the businesses that use it as core components of their stack basically have the same only take and never give attitude, is it any wonder that open source is struggling?
Hot take: when I first got into open source, I turned my nose up at the licenses that restrict large scale commercial use just like everyone else. Open Source Foundation sure hates them and refuses to even consider them open source. But as I understand the software industry better, I’m starting to come around to them. If you’re a company whose profits are over some threshold and you make that money through the use of open source software, why shouldn’t you have to give back to it? I think it’s not unreasonable that if you’re a billion dollar company running your entire computer infrastructure on open source projects, you should be required to contribute a small percentage of your profits to their continued development. Said software obviously brought you a ton of value so why shouldn’t you be expected to give back even a fraction of that value?
In another thread I mentioned OSI needs another tier to handle forced noncommercial source available licenses. Got down voted to hell and back.
Glad to see there are others of similar mind.
For completion, this is what the GNU GPL license encourages : it makes it so someone can’t sell their software without also providing the source, in the event they used your GPL-licensed library. It’s the good kind of trickle-down
I’m confident Autodesk wouldn’t have introduced indie pricing if it weren’t for Blender’s rise in popularity. Competition is good for everyone (except a company like Autodesk trying to get the highest returns for the least effort).
Gonna call you out on this, at least partially. It was SideFX, a real threat of a proprietary vendor who has sizable market share in 3D/VFX, releasing an entirely perpetually free learning edition and a low cost indie license who put the screws on Autodesk. Blender contributed to the decision, but it was absolutely not the primary pressure source.
Source: I have a Masters Degree in VFX, have studied the industry for over 35 years, and have worked professionally in it for going on 15.
I respectfully disagree. While true that Houdini was one of the first visual effects softwares offering an indie license, it was by no means the only one. Substance comes to mind, before the Adobe acquisition.
The timeline is also unconvincing: a considerable number of years elapsed after Houdini entered the market and Autodesk/Maya offered an indie license. However, is does coincide with better blender documentation and rise in YT content that rapidly grew the blender community.
Houdini can do more than FX, sure, and I’ve consistently heard nothing but good things, but its professional use remains relatively [edit: departmentally] niche. So, it may seem to someone in the niche of FX that Maya is losing ground to Houdini, but on a macro level Blender has the features and price point to threaten a larger portion of Autodesk/Maya’s market share. In lieu of better data, I’ll refer to google trends of the three softwares in which Houdini is a flat line at the bottom. I will gladly consider data to the contrary if you have it.
Either way, my main point was that competition is good, and who is responsible for how much doesn’t change that.
3d studio was notoriously hard to crack (click 30 consecutive times on the left side of the screen and your IK gets wrecked - hard) but became easy when they understood that students and poors learning the soft was a winning idea.
I remember it was possible to buy fully functional 3d studio max 4 copies at the flea market in 2003 or so. They came with an easy to use license keygen (or so I’m told).
Can you expand on that “click 30 times” bit?
Cracked soft back in the day often came with some manifesto or text from the guy/team that hacked it. My 3dsmax like in 1995 explained all the loopholes they closed to make it working, and one was that if the soft detected it was cracked, and it detected 30 consecutive mouse clicks exclusively on the left part of the screen, it wrecked your IK, inverse kinematics, used to animate walking and such.
This was to make the soft unusable, and hard to figure out how to crack it correctly.
Hahahah that’s so utterly specific. One of our Maya installs was broken in such a way that activating the move tool overlaid your viewport with a red tint, the rotation tool gave you a green tint and the scale tool, you guessed it, a blue tint. Since you tend to switch those tools often, especially as an animator, this was a nightmare. Not cracking related but still
One year later the soft is fixed.
“Where is my red tint?!”
I kinda miss the laugh inducing bugs, tbh
A skightly different view, but when I started a lot of companies did give back. I have worked with, hired, managed and led at least a half dozen teams with the explicit mission to make an already existing open source project do what we want by contributing functionality upstream, or by forking the project. I actually wrote a “open source engineering management” curriculum back when I was still teaching.
Unfortunately these efforts often sttuggle in a similar way - some developer who is not affiliated with us starts creating friction, and blowing up internal schedules, sometimes seemingly on purpose. Management starts to ask why so many of our features are dependent on SkankTopia6969 approving PRs and awkward conversations ensue. And then the project slowly becomes the process of educating an increasingly detached internal hierarchy on the realities of open source development, and people inevitability start asking why this is even in-house tooling in the first place.
Despite that, I’ve fielded a bunch of products like this, though always at fairly small scale (like $10M/yr revenue). The only time I’ve really done it big league the project got canned during a technical reorg.