[danShumway]

Agreed. Of course I don't think this is what GP was implying, at all, but for the record it would devalue a ton of work to say that Blender is where it is because it started as a closed source product.

Blender is where it is because the core organizers over the past decade have had a clear vision, great community management, and have worked their butts off to make the software as good as it is today -- in terms of UX, capabilities, performance, marketing... everything across the board.

When I started using Blender, it was not as powerful or usable as other software in the field. It was impressive, and having a good core did help, but the program today has just advanced so far, I'm not sure it's really comparable.

See also Krita, for another Open Source project I think is headed in the same direction as Blender. None of this stuff happens by chance, developing Open Source software that's popular with a general non-programmer audience is really stinking hard, and the teams that can pull it off deserve all of the praise they get.