Why is Blender in Financial Trouble?

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?
- I'm confident Autodesk wouldn't have introduced indie pricing if it weren't for Blender's rise in popularity. Competition is good for everyone (except a company like Autodesk trying to get the highest returns for the least effort).
  
  3d studio was notoriously hard to crack (click 30 consecutive times on the left side of the screen and your IK gets wrecked - hard) but became easy when they understood that students and poors learning the soft was a winning idea.
  
  Gonna call you out on this, at least partially. It was SideFX, a real threat of a proprietary vendor who has sizable market share in 3D/VFX, releasing an entirely perpetually free learning edition and a low cost indie license who put the screws on Autodesk. Blender contributed to the decision, but it was absolutely not the primary pressure source.
  Source: I have a Masters Degree in VFX, have studied the industry for over 35 years, and have worked professionally in it for going on 15.
- A skightly different view, but when I started a lot of companies did give back. I have worked with, hired, managed and led at least a half dozen teams with the explicit mission to make an already existing open source project do what we want by contributing functionality upstream, or by forking the project. I actually wrote a "open source engineering management" curriculum back when I was still teaching.
  Unfortunately these efforts often sttuggle in a similar way - some developer who is not affiliated with us starts creating friction, and blowing up internal schedules, sometimes seemingly on purpose. Management starts to ask why so many of our features are dependent on SkankTopia6969 approving PRs and awkward conversations ensue. And then the project slowly becomes the process of educating an increasingly detached internal hierarchy on the realities of open source development, and people inevitability start asking why this is even in-house tooling in the first place.
  Despite that, I've fielded a bunch of products like this, though always at fairly small scale (like $10M/yr revenue). The only time I've really done it big league the project got canned during a technical reorg.
- In another thread I mentioned OSI needs another tier to handle forced noncommercial source available licenses. Got down voted to hell and back.
  Glad to see there are others of similar mind.
- For completion, this is what the GNU GPL license encourages : it makes it so someone can't sell their software without also providing the source, in the event they used your GPL-licensed library. It's the good kind of trickle-down

Can you tell us?
- They're not really in financial trouble. They just need more money to develop new tools to compete with industry standard software like Autodesk, Maya, Houdini, etc.
  
  Autodesk Maya. Autodesk being the company, Maya the software. I disagree with the framing that Blender needs to develop (more) new tools [for the purpose of] competing. Maya is industry standard in animation mostly due to monopolistic practices (EG: purchasing competitors), not innovation or development. Blender needs more money to develop more tools. Full stop. Many professionals have been disappointed with Autodesk's offerings and development, and look to Blender for innovation.
- tldr: Blender only raised 3m last year, while trying to keep up to industrial standard such as Vulkan. These amount of money is not enough to pay for the development of the software. Other features they are trying to push are AI tool (for noise removal), built-in manual for tech support, extension support, online collaboration etc.
- Actually useful bot idea where it transcribes the video and posts it as a comment.
  
  I think they tried it with YouTube and it's dog shit still.
  I don't know if the bottleneck is on the AI or the subtitles tho.
- I follow Blender on Mastodon and, about a month ago, they started this campaign to see if they could double the amount of donations (from approximately 1% of users to 2% of users), and it's been decently successful so far just by putting "Can you donate?" banners in more places (and posting memes about donating on their social media).
  Here's a short video they put out about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v7Uhoot4Qg
  I think the funding campaign only lasts a month, so it's probably about over (though donations are always accepted, this is just a brief social media campaign to increase development funds for FY2025).
- Some dude came in and showed stuff in all the blenders while screaming about not breathing
  
  Will it blend?

Blender is a amazing tool. Been using it for years and donated. No regrets.

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.
- I think this take is starting to be a bit outdated. There have been numerous films to use Blender. The "biggest" recent one is RRR - https://www.blender.org/user-stories/visual-effects-for-the-indian-blockbuster-rrr/
  Man in the High Castle is also another notable "professional" example - https://www.blender.org/user-stories/visual-effects-for-the-man-in-the-high-castle/
  It's been slow, but Blender is starting to break into the larger industry. With bigger productions tending to come from non-U.S. producers.
  There is something to be said about the tooling exclusivity in U.S. studios and backroom deals. But ultimately money talks and Autodesk only has so much money to secure those rights and studios only have so much money to spend on licensing.
  I've been following blender since 2008 - what we have now is unimaginable in comparison to then. Real commercial viability has been reached (as a tool). What stands in the way now is a combination of entrenched interests and money. Intel shows how that's a tenuous market position at best, and actively self destructive at worst.
  Ultimately I think your claim that it's not used by real studios is patently and proveably false. But I will concede that it's still an uphill battle and moneyed interests are almost impossible to defeat. They typically need to defeat themselves first sorta like Intel did.
  
  I think we actually have similar conclusion.
  We do agree blender has been achieved a lot, but it's an unfair and uphill battle.
  I never claimed blender has not been used by real studios. But the market share for blender is bad, ~3% according to my quick search. And it's probably not from big studios. If we love something, I think we also have to be unbiased, so we can improve it.
  My point is that instead of blaming the blender team, we should cherish how much blender team has been achieved and offered in this harsh territory.
- btw, my university (EU) teaches blender
  
  Good for you. Lucky guy/girl.
  Good things for blender is the community is really strong and friendly. And lots of free high quality tutorials in YouTube and even in other streaming platform. Go donuts. We should cherish what the community have built and achieved.

They're not in trouble. They've just become used to fat wads, and that's ok.
Every corporate clamouring over them the last few years, to show how inclusive they were.
So, once you get used to that, you get used to that.
That's all it is.

I would like them to raise as much money as possible bit I am surprised that between this list of corporate sponsors they were only able to raise 3mil: https://fund.blender.org/
Also I don't see any major animation studios there. Do they not use blender? Or are they just stingy?
- The bigger the studio, the less likely they are to use or understand the concept of Open Source
  They see a price tag and assume quality. Blender is free, so it must be shit.
  
  In my org a lot of it can come down to having someone to demand fixes from. If something becomes a critical component of the workflows there has to be someone with an enforceable SLA held over them to get things fixed when needed.

@pmarcilus A few years ago, the Blender project decided to attract large commercial users as sponsors, not without success. The interests of small hobby users and developers, for example with regard to better documentation or a more complete Python API, became even more out of sight as a result. There are other people in need who need our donations more.