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@anteru it still baffles me how many companies who use Blender still don't give back to the devs while at the same time not blinking an eye at licensing Maya and Renderers for many thousands per year and per seat.
I really like the verified idea despite the problems you mentioned but we really need a shift in value from the users as well.
Open source is still great IMO but we should give devs the option to actually work on it if we like and use it. Aka funding.

@SpookyDoom @anteru on the one hand companies in general pay as little as they can get away with, on the other hand a big chunk of small devs use blender specifically because they can't afford maya / max

@logicalerror @SpookyDoom @anteru i think that was the case ~10 years ago but in recent years people use Blender because they like it - and because nowadays there are *TONS* of video tutorials, addons and other learning material for Blender.

Of course all of that became possible because of Blender's price (and quality), but this isn't the same as people using Blender because they can't afford Maya/Max.

@badsector @logicalerror @SpookyDoom Blender is also really not in the problem space here. They have a well working team, full-time contributors, and what not. That's basically as far away from the lone overworked maintainer keeping a key library going as it gets. I think Blender is doing fantastic for an open source project, but they have sufficient scale. You won't hire 10 people to maintain your `lzma` library.

@anteru @logicalerror @SpookyDoom yeah i agree, i mainly commented for that last part about people using Blender because they can't afford Maya / Max :-).

TBH i'm not sure what could be done to avoid something like xz-utils in practice. I don't think technical solutions would make any difference because at the core is a social issue (who do you trust) and people not only have different values there but also contribute to open source for different reasons and consider different things important.

@badsector @anteru @SpookyDoom You make it sound like I said that all of Blender's users use it because it's free, that's not what I said
I'm still certain it's a big reason why a lot of people start using it, because it has a low barrier of entry

@logicalerror @anteru @SpookyDoom my objection was specifically about people using Blender "because they can't affort Maya / Max", nothing else :-P.

I fully agree that Blender being free is a very important reason it is popular, but it is far from the only reason, after all it existed for decades (it even had some features other programs lacked - e.g.. i remember back in midlate-2000s some artists using it IIRC to simulate fluid physics) but it is only in recent years it exploded in popularity.