Since the article spends a lot of time talking about Krita, I want to throw some praise its way as well.<p>I moved over to Krita from Clip Studio when I decided to go pure-Linux on all of my computers, not because I thought the software was particularly competitive or good, but because I thought it was the most likely candidate to become competitive and good.<p>Krita still has a <i>lot</i> of rough edges, but I see it on a similar trajectory as Blender. It's very rapidly improving, not just in the sense of adding new features, but in becoming a more stable, reliable product.<p>I was using Blender a lot earlier in its development, and I remembered the comparisons people would make to Maya, and it's just... honestly, it's a little surreal to see it now well on its way to becoming something of an industry standard. Blender used to be really annoying to use, and only niche hobbyists were using it. All things considered, its rise in popularity/quality happened <i>fast</i>.<p>So similarly, I'm very bullish on Krita, and it's very encouraging to see members of that community looking at Blender and taking lessons from its development. Krita is one of the more promising and encouraging OS software projects that I follow.
This blog post is much more interesting than the (ambiguous) title might suggest. The blog post is really all about comparing the funding models of Blender with other OSS projects - and aiming to demonstrate that the Blender funding model is successfully creating a valuable piece of OSS. Wrestling with funding is a major challenge for OSS projects, even if they don't believe they require funding.
Linux Desktop users do indeed seem to spend a disproportionate amount of time bickering about which popular apps best fulfill their purity tests:<p>whether the app is "free" enough for their liking (MIT vs GPL-based license, etc),<p>whether it picked the "right" frontend in the never-ending GTK vs QT battle,<p>whether it is written in an "acceptable" language (Electron being Satan Incarnate, of course),<p>whether it has been properly packaged as a DEB/RPM/Snap/Flatpak/AUR/AppImage, etc.<p>Fail any one of these things, and the app is instantly "unusable" and we should all use ncurses-based obscure-thing-I-found-over-the-weekend-in-some-dude's-PPA.<p>Meanwhile, an increasing array of "free as in freedom" apps that are widely available and cross-platform (e.g. Blender, VLC, Audacity, Calibre, etc.) serve the larger community by just letting people get shit done, and build up name-recognition as a result.
Blender is an example of a project that is laser focused on their users. Every aspect of their development is guided by that focus. The Open Movie projects are a way of ensuring that what they work on is something that professionals need. You can what you want about blender but their continuing growth in industry demonstrates that their focus is paying off. They are quite literally closing the gap with tools like Maya at ridiculous speeds.
Excerpt:<p>"Blender’s development fund currently brings in about 1,200,000 euros a year, which funds 20 full-time developers. That’s not the only source of funding. Blender has about 172 developers in the past year, and 550 over its entire existence, and 64 in the past month, same as LibreOffice. Looking at the last number, it means that there are anyway more volunteer committers in the Blender community than paid developers. Funded development hasn’t eaten the community.<p>Let’s hazard a guess: <i>Blender has four times the installed base of AutoDesk Maya</i>. This is pretty rough, of course, so ingest with salt.<p>My thoughts:<p>These are important non-software aspects of Blender which are critical for acceptance by new users, which is critical to maintain a healthy user base, which should in turn yield a well-community-supported codebase...<p>In other words, this makes Blender a safe choice in corporate environments where a choice may exist between it and commercial offerings, such as Autodesk's Maya...
What I’ve been impressed with following Blender for a long time is they communicate their development well with their users. They provide demos, give discussions, give example files and videos, and make you realize that the donations are going to something tangible. Other projects don’t do nearly as good of a job with this.
This is the first time I hear Krita but I support all good open-source projects like Blender<p>What I like in Blender, except its invaluable community, is its UX, they follow a good logic in interfaces. If someone is familiar with 3Ds Max or Maya, in less than an hour can understand the whole software and how to work with it even without any help or tutorial<p>However, I'm not in the VFX industry and I'm an architect and Building Information Modeling/Management - BIM technologist, so recently we've started to improve Blender for Digital Built Environment industry, an open-source plugin (interfaces) called BlenderBIM [1]<p>So hope we help Blender and Blender community to speed up its success<p>[1] <a href="https://blenderbim.org/" rel="nofollow">https://blenderbim.org/</a>
I installed Blender at the school I work at because it had an MSI installer. Did not install Krita because it did not. If you want it to be the default used in schools, make it as easy to deploy as possible.<p>The gimp fork Glimpse is planning an MSI installer, so that'll be installed soon
On Linux Desktop funding: companies like Red Hat and Canonical fund much of the development on things like GNOME.<p>The real budget is likely much higher than the article suggest, especially now that Ubuntu fully switched to Gnome.
A minor correction - the article makes a couple of mentions of "Handbrake donation[s]", but I think the author was referring to the donations made to KDE and Gnome by the Handshake project.<p><a href="https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/08/gnome-foundation-receives-400000-from-handshake-org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/08/gnome-foundation-receives...</a>