[bsder]

Firefox and Blender have significant commercial investment behind them to keep them maintained. And they both started out as proprietary.

VLC I don't know about.

The fact that there are so few successful, non-programming examples exactly demonstrates the point.

[astrange]

VLC is mostly based on ffmpeg which didn't have much public commercial sponsorship for years, until the post-YouTube era, where there was some sponsorship from Google but mostly just a lot more small and large closed-source developers releasing crappy "video converter programs" and not crediting it.

It instead was mostly developed by a schizophrenic Austrian math genius in his free time from not being regularly employed, plus some other grad student types.

[detaro]

Blender has significant investment because users pay developers for its maintenance, yes.