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Comment by Joeboy | Hacker News Reader

They have money to pay developers, which differentiates them from the vast majority of OSS projects. Obviously that's not all there is to it, but I'm sure it makes a huge difference.

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And I can't imagine that the kind of devs who can work on rendering engines come cheap either.

https://fund.blender.org/ says 50k EUR / month pays for 10 developers, so about 60k EUR a year each I guess.

Edit: I can't remember the details but I vaguely recall Blender 2.8's headline new realtime renderer EEVEE was a by-product of a GSoC project, or something along those lines.

The very best charities have administration costs of about 5-10% IIRC. I'd expect at least 20% overhead to pay for administration (including things like paying the equivalent of employers NICs in UK, insurance) and coordination (git server, backup, infrastructure, meetings)?

So maybe more like €48k gross for devs?

I guess their accounts are out there somewhere?

Brecht wrote the initial Cycles implementation during the time he was away from the Blender Foundation working for some other (who's name I forget) renderer company -- so, basically, for free.

Back when I used to hack on the low-hanging Blender fruit my impression of the core devs was they did it for the love of doing it, any one of them could've gotten a job paying a lot more but they always stuck around because they liked it. And that was when they could only afford a couple fulltime devs who I imagine weren't making a whole lot.

Also, they couldn't pay anyone enough to mess with the spaghetti code of the old builtin renderer...

SolidAngle is the company he was working for, creators of the commercial Arnold renderer.

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