[BurningCycles]

>Blender was a commercial product

18 years ago, since then it's been open source and paid for by donations

>and has some big studios doing those donations

These big studios started donating this past year when the development fund was started (and really took off during the latter part of this year for some reason), before that it was donations and in later years also the Blender Cloud service.

>And I bet only a lucky few of the contributors get to see the money.

Well, most (if not all) of the Blender developers now working full time where Blender contributors, also Blender is a non-profit organization.