I don’t really see the story of Blender as a positive one. Afaik they only started receiving really adequate funding and industry adoption very recently, for the longest time being a fan of blender was kind of depressing, the industry mostly failed (and is probably still failing) to adequately reward its hero.
That looks like the same story I told, with a different framing. Free/cheap was snapping at the heels of the expensive software, and things evolved in a way that has benefitted everyone, all as a result of the users and companies taking their own decisions as they saw fit in pursuing their own interests. There is a wide spectrum of tools from free to expensive, and they all get better from year to year.
self-determined price commitments would have resulted either in the emergence of a cheaper commercial competitor to maya or faster price decreases from them.
All the proposal does is reduce the ability of companies to respond to the conditions around them. It is indifferent to whether the responses they prohibit are ones you approve of or ones you do not.
That looks like the same story I told, with a different framing. Free/cheap was snapping at the heels of the expensive software, and things evolved in a way that has benefitted everyone, all as a result of the users and companies taking their own decisions as they saw fit in pursuing their own interests. There is a wide spectrum of tools from free to expensive, and they all get better from year to year.
I don’t buy this, for all the reasons that Dagon has posted.
All the proposal does is reduce the ability of companies to respond to the conditions around them. It is indifferent to whether the responses they prohibit are ones you approve of or ones you do not.