But setting that aside, rather than a philanthropic billionaire, I've long thought big companies like Ford / Boeing / Mitsubishi ought to pool together into some kind of consortium and buy out Dassault to open-source the code. It would probably pay back multiple times over for them -- not through saving on licensing fees, but through all the little efficiency improvements throughout their supply chains. Small machine shops would be able to offer more competitive quotes to customers; more shops would pop up; lead times would improve; file formats would standardize and version mismatches would disappear; new and custom features could get added faster Blender-like; independent developers could write plugins to automate or accelerate mechanical design; new ME hires could gain experience with the tools at home. It would be a huge boon to the industry as a whole. Shame that it hasn't happened yet.