| I think it's a lot of little things. - Blender came out of commercial, and the community was never really anti-commercial. Lots of classic FOSS communities have trouble identifying with paid development for example, worrying it will lead to a form of classicism in the community, etc. Blender, OTOH, tried to make sure there's core staff doing it fulltime basically from the get-go, I think. This makes a lot of stuff happen - taking care of not-fun things, having stable contact points, professionalism, doing good fundraising, etc. - Blender took dogfooding seriously, with their open movie projects - Blender took user research seriously, running events and inviting artists over and watching them use the software - Blender did good community management, with Blender Artists and other initiatives - In Blender's area integration, automation, tooling are all very complex, and they made some good key decisions, e.g. adopting Python for scripting just when Python was becoming the default programming language for non-programmers - Because the application domain Blender is in is so complex, training is important, and the competition probably underestimated making their products affordable for teaching institutions (call me out if wrong, I am not as confident on this point). Blender supported creation of training materials pretty well, too They simply got a lot of things right. Projects that paid attention (e.g. Krita) are also blossoming. |