Does Blender make any money? Are the developers compensated?
I've always had a kind of conflicting perspective, as a developer myself, I enjoy the vibrant exchange of information and source which is open and often free and even "gratis". It has helped me grow and learn, it empowers me to be more productive as I can leverage a lot of existing code. That said, it also often worries me that the culture isn't willing to pay for a lot of these, since being a developer is also my profession. If we get users used to not paying for software, and developers willing to work for free, does it devalue the job of developer?
For example, I often wonder, if there was only proprietary software, would developer salaries be even higher?
Would there be more devs who are small businesses, one to 3 man teams, working on software like grep, 7zip, calendars, todos, calculators, etc. ?
As it seems, open source, especially the licenses which have the side effect of being mostly "gratis" forces the market into offering a service or product which isn't the software itself. Which is why a lot of devs can't make a living of being a small business, we need to be employed by bigger companies who offer collateral products or services.
The direct financial impact is one thing to consider. But another is... I'll describe it as capability, complexity, and progress. The ability for developers to build on each other's stuff is hugely significant. Otherwise, every company reimplements the same stuff, and even for what they buy, the standard (and interoperable) solution that the industry settles on and is thus able to advance further, is determined by the vagaries of business: pricing, approach, market segmentation, lockin strategy, leaders' whims, etc. Quality factors in there somewhere. As a prominent CEO once said, "We're not here to write excellent software. We're here to write software that's better than our competitors'."
Free software is more important at the foundational levels, because the virtuous cycle of endless improvement raises the baseline for everyone over time.
For those of us whose livelihoods depend on software salaries, it cuts both ways. We can't get paid for writing grep, but we also don't have to spend our careers rewriting grep over and over again at different companies.
I've always had a kind of conflicting perspective, as a developer myself, I enjoy the vibrant exchange of information and source which is open and often free and even "gratis". It has helped me grow and learn, it empowers me to be more productive as I can leverage a lot of existing code. That said, it also often worries me that the culture isn't willing to pay for a lot of these, since being a developer is also my profession. If we get users used to not paying for software, and developers willing to work for free, does it devalue the job of developer?
For example, I often wonder, if there was only proprietary software, would developer salaries be even higher?
Would there be more devs who are small businesses, one to 3 man teams, working on software like grep, 7zip, calendars, todos, calculators, etc. ?
As it seems, open source, especially the licenses which have the side effect of being mostly "gratis" forces the market into offering a service or product which isn't the software itself. Which is why a lot of devs can't make a living of being a small business, we need to be employed by bigger companies who offer collateral products or services.