[p-e-w]

Wait, Thunderbird is getting more donations than Blender?

I was under the impression that Thunderbird is on life support, while Blender is everywhere.

[zuInnp]

At one of last Blender conferences, the founder (and at that time CEO) gave some insights about funding and compared it to Thunderbird. https://youtu.be/VZ5022VaMmA?si=m1hD9wEQ16s8Zu3b&t=1297 ;

Fore More recent numbers: In 2024[1] (last info I found), Blender had 3.1m € in donations (600k more than the year before) and Thunderbird had around 9m € [2].

I kind of get it, Blender is way more niche than Thunderbird, but imagine what they could do with even more money.

[1] https://download.blender.org/foundation/Blender-Foundation-A... on page 76 [2] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-... I did the money conversion based on today's exchange rates

[simonw]

> Blender is way more niche than Thunderbird

Is that true though? I mean sure, more people use email - but I would guess there are more Blender users than Thunderbird users in the world.

There's plenty of competition for an excellent free email experience. Very little for 3D modeling software.

Update: Looks like I guessed wrong. I found some approximate user numbers:

Thunderbird has analytics that show around 10 million active daily installations: https://stats.thunderbird.net/

Blender stats are harder to find. They reported 23 million total downloads in 2024, which suggests daily actives significantly lower than 10 million: https://download.blender.org/foundation/Blender-Foundation-A...

[whywhywhywhy]

Mozilla invests more time in being a foundation than software so makes sense their donations are higher.

[Waterluvian]

> but imagine what they could do with even more money.

Quite potentially some really great stuff, but I’m skeptical that this is actually a great way to kill a good thing. Ideally money isn’t an issue and everyone is paid well, and somehow the organization managers know how to feel out and draw a line on scale/ambitions.

[ekianjo]

wow thunderbird gets so much and achieves so little? amazing in a terrible way

[Waterluvian]

I’ve got to imagine there’s examples of orgs stopping donation intake when they get into the “money is nice but we cannot in good faith utilize all this without scaling into something we don’t want to be.”

[wccrawford]

A quick AI Google search and some fact-checking later, and yeah. At least as of 2 years ago, Thunderbird was getting 3x the contributions that Blender was.

It just goes to show you how badly managed Thunderbird is, since Blender is doing so much more with the money. I'm more and more disappointed with Mozilla all the time.

[virtualritz]

It couldn't possibly be that Blender simply has much more volunteer contributions?

Since hacking on a 3D DCC in your spare time may be more than three times as enticing to people than doing the same on an email client?

I'd wager Occam's razor favors this explanation.

[jack_pp]

Or Thunderbird is much older and has a lot more users

[TheGoddessInari]

Blender is actually much, much older than Thunderbird.

[jack_pp]

wow, did not expect blender to be 32 years old, thanks for correcting me.

but still, they were open sourced about 1 year apart. I still think having a bigger user base is a good reason for the difference

[redwall_hp]

That's relevant to why it historically had bizarre UX issues, like ctrl+s being the shortcut to erase the scene and start a new one: it predated most of those conventions, and has its own UI tooling. It's also always been designed to use three mouse buttons, coming from the Unix world, which used to be problematic when not everyone had a mouse with a clicky scroll wheel.

It's come an absurdly long way since I first dabbled with it in the early 2000s, and has gone from a niche FOSS tool to something widely used in its field.

Nowadays, Blender is an example of masterful UX for a professional tool. Immediately responsive, information dense UI with keyboard shortcuts for absolutely everything. Actions are composable, like with vim: something like "ex5" will extrude five units on the x axis.

[zipy124]

Isn't this because thunderbird contributions are not ring-fenced but go to mozilla?

[thaumasiotes]

Thunderbird did manage to buy out K-9.

[jamesfinlayson]

Oh did it? I remember using K-9 on my Android phone years ago and being pretty happy with it.

[thaumasiotes]

Yes, K-9 has been shut down and Thunderbird for Android is what used to be K-9.

[Jaxan]

Market size is different: everyone needs a mail client, but not everyone needs 3d modelling.

[kbolino]

The audience may be larger, but I don't feel like it's anywhere near "everyone". Personally, I don't know anyone who still uses a dedicated email client except in specific institutional settings. I haven't touched one outside of a corporate office myself in 20 years. Webmail has been good enough for longer than many people have been using computers.