More and more I'm starting to see users of completely free and community-run open source projects expecting the same level of polish and customer service as proprietary commercial software, doing nothing to support or contribute to development while only complaining about how horrible they are when they are not able to do that. Then they switch to proprietary software, and when corporate enshitification happens to that software, they proceed to wonder why open source projects are all dying and corporate software vendors are getting more brazen in their shitty business practices due to not having serious open source competitors anymore. It's whatever when individual people do it with software on their personal computers, but when the businesses that use it as core components of their stack basically have the same only take and never give attitude, is it any wonder that open source is struggling?

Hot take: when I first got into open source, I turned my nose up at the licenses that restrict large scale commercial use just like everyone else. Open Source Foundation sure hates them and refuses to even consider them open source. But as I understand the software industry better, I'm starting to come around to them. If you're a company whose profits are over some threshold and you make that money through the use of open source software, why shouldn't you have to give back to it? I think it's not unreasonable that if you're a billion dollar company running your entire computer infrastructure on open source projects, you should be required to contribute a small percentage of your profits to their continued development. Said software obviously brought you a ton of value so why shouldn't you be expected to give back even a fraction of that value?

While I think some comments are true in general for other aspect of open source software zones, blender is a special case.

The target audience for blender are artists for movie, video and games. And these industries are very capital intensive and highly regulated by limited distributors. If you tell ppl you can only do blender instead of maya or other big names, it's like a programmer tells ppl he can only do perl. Good luck for finding a job. Just like programming industry without microservice architecture, if the whole team use one language, you have to use that. Just do a job search.

Game engine is similar. If you don't use unity or unreal. No aaa game for you. (Indie games are better in my personal opinion) So game assets made by blender is always second citizens.

Because of the above factors, third parties market place products' price are always low. It's good for buyers, but sucks for indie sellers. Compare the catalog between blender market place and daz3d's market place.

Universities will only teach products like maya instead of blender, just like java. Policy makers don't care about the best interest of students. Their policy is usually only outdated. Why java? They should only allow to use Nokia.

Unlike games, you can hardly try the indie route for movie. It's either go big or go die. When do you see a blender movie being shown in your local cinema?

blender is the only free less professional choice. The problem is their target audience is so broke.