Blender's only competition back in the day was pirating Maya but FreeCAD and friends have to compete with the cut-down hobbyist license on Fusion 360.
And even then we have to compete with the free tiers on modern subscription apps. That's arguably a far smaller audience than hobbyist CG artists. So people were willing to crowdfund it they were able to buy the software copyright off of NaN's creditors and that enthusiasm continued for multiple decades until it became the massive behemoth that it is today.įor us to get a FOSS CAD app we need hobbyist buy-in. The fact that it was shareware meant they had a large hobbyist fanbase - it was very cheap compared to professional tools. It started out as an in-house tool at NeoGeo, then got sold as a proprietary shareware app by NaN Software, which went bankrupt. The second option is how Blender happened. Bootstrapping off of hobbyist users and crowdfunding to keep developers on board. Catering to the needs of developers, such that the user community is also the development community.Ģ. The way that big FOSS apps succeed is either by.ġ.
