Based on the charity principle, I find it rather simple. Those companies find Blender really useful for 3D modeling and because it’s widely used and free, they want the sofware’s development and support to go on with no financial problems whatsoever.
Press X to doubt
not everything is EEE man, chill
companies (even those that do proprietary shit) invest in FOSS tools that they themselves use, there’s a lot of tools built by or funded by shitty companies that are great for linux, ZSTD compression (developed by Facebook of all people) being the golden example of thisu/Matheo_biz comment is not out of place. It is very valid to doubt philantropy from corps. And this one is especially weird because Blender direct competes against their products and it is a very real threat to their existence.
I don’t think it’s so much philanthropy as the companies making a financial calculus and realizing that funding Blender saves them money in the long run. If their artists had to use a commercial product then they’d have to license it, and the cost of that can ramp up pretty fast.
With Blender the company can donate whatever they want whenever they want without any strings attached, and the cost of development and maintenance is amortized across many companies all funding the project. And since these companies aren’t in a business of making a 3D editor themselves the product itself doesn’t threaten their own business.
Ultimately it comes down to a simple cost benefit analysis.
funding Blender saves them money in the long run. If their artists had to use a commercial product then they’d have to license it
How does this work for Adobe? Blender is a direct threat to After Effects and cinema 4d for example.
It’s possible that Adobe will just shut down these products if they’re not financially viable for them. The thing to remember is that Adobe is now in direct competition with Blender and all the other companies funding it. In order to stay competitive Adobe would have to match the level of aggregate effort all on their own, and to convince people to use their proprietary products over the one that’s rapidly becoming industry standard. This goes beyond simply having good features, it’s a question of ecosystem and community as well. If anybody can start playing with Blender then that’s what most people are learning. The more companies use Blender the bigger the market for people who know how to use it becomes, and so on. I expect that Adobe is simply throwing in the towel here.
Your argument is based on the premise of philantropy, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
Same thing goes for google on Linux, they have fucsia right?
To earn good will and good PR for peanuts money.
Tax write off.
But it really does benefit Adobe & Epic to show support for Blender. Blender users use Adobe to make 2d textures and they also make assets for Epic games. (As mention by another)
Yes I can see the assets benefiting epic games, unsure about Adobe though. Many blender tutorials (CG matter as an example) uses gimp or other free software for textures.
