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Blender was a commercial product before becoming OSS, and some of the original folks are still around.


I'm not sure how I feel about Blender, the UI in the older versions was notoriously niche if not outright confusing. Here's a video comparing the versions in a simple example task: https://youtu.be/Vz_GxPMActM

Whatever caused it to succeed and catch enough attention to be continuously improved, I'm thankful for that. Same as with game engines like Godot and other similar FOSS projects, maybe even LibreOffice not dying like OpenOffice did, though that's a whole tale in of itself. Actually, I'll similarly celebrate improvements in proprietary software, too.

Then again, I still think that Inkscape and some of the other software that gets touted as good is actually not very usable, so I'm a bit opinionated.


Blender has been open source for over 20 years. UX of the proprietary version was dismal.


Its just proves that UX can get better. Blender has had particularly bad UX (when it was commercial soft) and 3D is one of the most challenging software.

Its just mostly about focus of the project and agency of people trying to make UX better.


Yea, the question really is will the OSS tool survive long enough to have the UX fixed. In Blender's case, yes, but that's not been true for many other OSS projects. Just look at how many dead electron projects are floating around the internet.

Arguably it's more important to create software that solves a problem first so there is an incentive for people to keep using it. But the less people use it, the longer it will take for the UX to improve organically (see Blender and Inkscape).




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