Maybe that's why people don't bother targeting Linux. Look at your comment. Why are people so easily offended these days by things that are out here, doing no harm to anyone. Like, you could just hit the back button and go on with your day. Why do you need to be so offended? If this is the sort of stuff that triggers you I can't imagine how your day looks like.
I find it interesting when folks criticize software for not being free / open source. There's nothing stopping you from creating the FOSS you are disappointed someone else didn't create - or from investing your own time into improving an existing project. I don't think we need to criticize someone else's choice to go a different path.
We don't _need_ to criticize it, but there's also nothing wrong with expressing the criticism. Maybe I would have found this useful and worth paying for, but I can't without having the source. It's a shame that the potential usefulness of this work is limited in a way that prevents people like me from supporting it.
Blender is actually a business in spirit (even if not legally) and has very active and aggressive marketing. That is why they are dominating the OSS DCC tool space and get millions in corporate sponsorship.
Got to be realistic. That was one piece of software and it took decades and a team and plenty of free labor to get to where it is. People have to eat daily.
The vast majority of FLOSS projects are underfunded and we have far more cases of projects that had to shutdown because they lacked funding than projects that were successfully able to fund themselves.
Survivor bias backed examples are not a good argument.
You know, survival bias.
For each floss project where its devs can make a decent living just working on that project, I can can name way more where they depend on the free labour/willing of their maintainers.
Just to add a bit more context to this: Blender started as an "in-house" software (studio NeoGeo), written by Ton Roosendaal, in January 1994. In 1998, they founded a company (NaN) that would distribute Blender under a freemium pricing strategy (you would buy keys to unlock more features). But the base software could be downloaded for free. In 2002, that company went bankrupt. And with the help of 250,000 users, they raised enough money to buy back the rights owned by the investors to release Blender under an new licence: the GPL licence. In May of 2002, the Blender Foundation (non-profit) was created.
Blender dev here.
A majority (like 2/3) of the development nowadays happens through the core development team: it's around 30-40 full-time/part-time paid developers. Most are located in the Netherlands. We make an average salary that's slightly higher than the average in that sector here in our country. All of the money comes exclusivly from the Dev Fund (fund.blender.org). It's all donations, no strings attached. We say "thank you" and (if they wish) put the logo on the website.
