[const_cast]

I think the main difference between OSS like Blender and the competition is it seems like OSS only gets better. Each version is a little bit better, so projects that were once not competitive catch up. Blender is an obvious example, but also look at Krita, or the entire KDE project. These pieces of software age like fine wine: they get more features, they get faster, and they get more stable.

Closed-source software seems to get... stuck. In the best case. Often, they regress: becoming buggier from version to version with less features. I think of Windows and the entire Microsoft suite of applications.

I think one exception is Gnome. Gnome loves removing features more than they love not implementing popular Wayland protocols.

[Joel_Mckay]

With OSS, unless every add-on is part of the build tree or package repo testing... it quickly becomes broken as the ecosystem constantly evolves.

i.e. of the $3k of community Blender plugins/add-ons we evaluated last year, only around 60% are still functional in stable blender releases. Additionally, many built-in core features like Fracture became broken in 4.x due to API permutations, and getting split into its own module.

In a production environment one must version lock Blender for the project. =3

[const_cast]

IMO it's always a good idea to vendor software. But yes, OSS typically moves fast. It's a tradeoff.

[MrScruff]

Blender is definitely getting better compared to things like Maya but I don't think this argument holds for Houdini & Sidefx.