Is open source cheaper? Should it be?

Several weeks ago, I discussed with others about how Blender, despite being open source, relies mainly on donations and personal contributions.

But many don’t donate. That conversation stuck with me.

Others in the Blender “universe” make lots of money in the name of Blender. Some add-on developers and website owners make more than a full-time Blender developer.

It feels unfair. It got me thinking about open source. And of hypotheticals.

A Hypothetical

What if (in a very very dystopian universe), Blender ran ads? Like just had pop-up ads every few minutes.

How much money would Blender get?

I tried an online calculator. Mind you, none of this is evidence-based. So if you want to go full business on me with more accurate numbers, feel free to reply with your analytics.

Ton guessed between 2-4 million active users for 20 million Blender downloads. Let’s go with 3 million, and 1 million of those users are active and willing to view ads.

If each of those people used Blender for, say, 2 hours a day on average, with a 30-day month, with a new pop-up every 3 minutes, that comes out to… beep boop beep 1.2 billion views of ads. With the online calculator, it comes out to several million dollars, heavily depending on the conversion rate.

Again, a very generous calculation. But it’s more than Blender’s earnings in 2024, based on the keynote.

I’m not endorsing Blender to do this. Don’t get mad at me. It’s just a hypothetical!

But think about apps like Spotify. For the end user, it’s a free app where you are “paying” in viewing/hearing ads. For some, that’s fine. Spotify still makes money from ad revenue (also by not giving enough to artists).

And anyone paying Spotify Premium pays more than the ads are worth. Even bigger profit!

The Customer’s Consent

Why talk about all this? Because we consumers (at least, enough consumers for companies to be sustained by) underestimate the convenience and our economic acceptance of ads. You view a virtual billboard or listen to an ad, maybe click on it, but then you don’t have to pay for the app at all.

Other places in the Blender universe use ads too. Blendernation? Absolutely. Blender Artists forum? Definitely. Your favorite Blender content creators? They run ads via sponsors and YouTube to make an income.

I’m not saying this to imply that anyone running ads are evil (you may think that, but hold some space for a moment). I am actually saying something about (most) consumers: a product being free is more important than the method of the creator’s income.

The growth of pro-privacy consumers on the web has certainly affected the growth of open source. “Free open source software” or FOSS has a lot of meaning behind it, but to most users: it’s free, no ads, no tracking (or at the very least, you could find and/or build a version without ads or tracking).

So if more of Blender’s audience is pro-privacy, what does that mean for Blender?

“Anyone here use ad blockers?”

There was a comedic moment when Ton said that they can only track Blender downloads if the user is not using an ad tracker. When he did a show of hands, most in the room ran ad blockers.

I get the usefulness of an ad blocker, but at least put blender.org on its whitelist.

So the open source community is growing by the day, and many of them want respect of privacy and from solicitation. Blender running ads would not go well for that very reason.

If a consumer is unwilling to watch ads, are they willing to support sufficiently any other way? What are our options? If a customer is unwilling to view ads, and the product is openly free, what is the owner left to do?

• Subscriptions and paying for a copy of the software fall short when GPL allows anyone to redistribute it. If someone does not want to pay, they can just get it from someone who did.

• Blender Cloud is a subscription model for Blender education and assets. It’s separate from Blender — perfect from a license standpoint. But its audience is not nearly big enough to pay for Blender.

• I have already talked here about Blender Foundation selling add-ons. It would become a paywall of features, which undermines the point of open source.

• Valuable feedback (which I talk about here, regarding data collection), while ideal, very few are willing to do it.

That leaves us with…

Donations

And that’s what Blender is asking for. Go figure.

Because when users expect to get something for free, asking for anything else requires holding something back in the product itself. The owner’s hands are tied in manipulating the product to financially incentivize customers.

So, Blender should still put all its features out there. Not part of them. For free.

And the best way to contribute is to donate.

The good news is not everyone has to donate, and not even that much, to make it worthwhile for Blender. But we do need to donate. I do, and I would highly recommend any avid users of Blender do the same.

Who is responsible for open source?

Open source is an ideal, but not within a capitalist economy. Before I go any further, I’m not anti-capitalism or anything like that. Let’s not regress back to the “Red Scare” of the Cold War, shall we?

I’m only saying that open source de-incentivizes capitalism-based methods of earning money. You’re not paying to get the product. You’re not paying to keep the product.

You just keep it. Any further support for Blender is purely your choice.

A New Kind of Customer Obligation

But now we got a different kind of complication.

Customers can create their own version of Blender (like the Blender Game Engine did once it was deprecated), support with their own money, report bugs, or make fixes.

Just like the product owner.

Now we got a level playing field. The customer (and therefore, the entire community) becomes just as responsible for the life of the product as the original creator.

But some customers don’t like that. They want to be separate from the product. “The owner should take care of it all, not me. I’m just using it.”

Which brings up an interesting question: do customers want to take responsibility for the product? Or do they just want to use it?

For those who do not have the time to participate in development, just donating every month is easier. But now they’re back to a pseudo-subscription model, which is one of the very things these people are running away from!

So is it really cheaper?

Or are we asking the wrong question?

Be it supporting Blender financially with donations; educating its community; or participating in its development with fixes, features, and feedback.

So here’s the better question: how will you own Blender?