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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

While this is 'good' for the users of the software, isn't it 'bad' for the software industry?

Community funded projects will never match the salaries that companies like AutoDesk pay their developers.

Ton Roosendaal (Blender creator) estimated in 2018 interview that 3D software market is very small, and pulled up Autodesk's (3DsMax/Maya, etc) business results from that time, which amounted to 25000 - 30000 yearly licenses. He also claimed that Maya has "maybe 20" developers behind with things being similar for other products.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJEWOTZnFeg (jump to 1h mark)

At $1500/yearly subscription, 30,000 licenses is $45 million a year. Don't foreget about everyone who works at Autodesk that isn't a developer but stil involved with the product. And then there are plugin writers (are there commercial plugins for Blender?) and resellers etc

Autodesk does $2.7B/year in revenue. The revenue from 3DsMax and Maya is a rounding error compared to the revenue from their CAD products.

There was some unrest in the community just recently when Ton reminded everybody that Blender is GPL and that commercial plug-ins need to be GPL as well.

Ton is underestimating the market considerably, but he's still right in that it's a tiny market. But what he misses is the fact that Autodesk isn't developing its DCC tools for profit. They are for prestige, that is, supported by image marketing rather than sales. So the dev headcount is probably too low as well.

It's not a zero-sum game; multiple software that performs the same function can co-exist, and should co-exist. If Autodesk is feeling a pinch on their bottom line because of a free software product, the burden is on them to make a better product; they've certainly had the runway to do so in the past 30 years of building products and acquiring other similar products.

The market is weird and it's currently a zero sum game at best. DCC tools are in this weird little market that has extremely few paying (and mostly cash-strapped) customers, but the software itself is ridiculously complex. IIRC, Maya was estimated at ~5 mio. lines of code when version 1 or 2 was released, and it has gotten much, much more complex since. My understanding is that not all companies selling these programs are in the market for profit. If that goes away, it's likely that everybody loses.

A community funded project could end up with someone like Linus Torvalds or Fabrice Bellard working on it, whereas a company like AutoDesk wouldn't pay enough to hire someone of that calibre.

Don't those people work on things because they want to and not because the community pays them?

There are plenty of high-caliber developers working on commercial products

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