Blender is GPL. Yet corporations fund it. Go figure.

https://www.blender.org/about/license/

The Software

Blender is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL, or “free software”).

This license grants people a number of freedoms:

You are free to use Blender, for any purpose

You are free to distribute Blender

You can study how Blender works and change it

You can distribute changed versions of Blender

The GPL strictly aims at protecting these freedoms, requiring everyone to share their modifications when they also share the software in public. That aspect is commonly referred to as Copyleft.

The Blender Foundation and its projects on blender.org are committed to preserving Blender as free software.

https://fund.blender.org/

Unity. AWS. Meta. nVidia. Decentraland. NetEase Games. Epic. egirl. Intel. AMD. Blender Kit. Ubisoft. Blender Market. Phala Network. Adobe. Microsoft. Google. Steam Workshop. Reallusion. Activision. Op Games. CoreWeave. CGCookie. Q Orihect Studio. Wube Studio. Oracle. Kista. Looking Glass Factory. WebsiteSetup. Numfum. StringKing. Cube. CGSLab. BlenderMagic. PolygonIQ. [...]

>This means that having support from companies is incompatible with making libre software.

Bullshit. Cygnus Support's motto was "We Make Free Software Affordable". Big companies support free software, and free software supports big companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_Solutions

https://web.archive.org/web/20220228142052/http://www.toad.c...

>Marketing Cygnus Support -- Free Software history [...]

>We had the grandiose idea that major computer companies like Sun, SGI, and DEC would fire their compiler departments and use our free compilers and debuggers instead, paying us a million dollars a year for support and development. That wasn't quite right, but before we starved, we stumbled into the embedded systems market, doing jobs for Intel (the i960, a now-forgotten RISC chip), AMD (their now-forgotten but nice 29000 RISC), and various companies like 3Com and Adobe who had to port major pieces of code to these chips. In that market, once we fixed the tools to support cross-compiling, we had major advantages over the existing competitors, and we swarmed right through the market for 32-bit embedded system programming tools. And ultimately, we did get million-dollar contracts, such as one from Sony for building Playstation compilers and emulators. This allowed game developers to start working a year before the Playstation hardware was available. This enabled the Playstation to come to market sooner, with more and better games. [...]

>Later, after hiring more experienced executives, we discovered that our pricing was "leaving money on the table". We still needed to estimate our own costs and overheads and profits -- but we also needed to estimate how much money our work would SAVE our customer, or MAKE FOR our customer. When there was a big discrepancy in those two numbers, we could raise our price significantly, and the customer would still be happy. For example, the Sony PlayStation contract enabled Sony to ship the PlayStation months earlier (with working third party game software). Even a single month earlier of shipments would result in hundreds of millions of dollars of income for Sony. Similarly, big networking vendors like Cisco had tens or hundreds of millions of dollars riding on the introduction dates of their new products. We were selling them "insurance": if any big problems came up in the development software as they worked on the product, we'd fix them rapidly so their engineers would be able to deliver the product on time. Chip vendors, for whom we built many compilers, were betting big money on getting at least one large customer for their latest chip. Early availability of our tools allowed their customers to reliably prototype large, complex products with the chip. Our pricing gradually grew to include a percentage of the value that our work was creating out in the world, for our customers. [...]

Gumby, one of the founders of Cygnus, was just discussing gdb development on Hacker News a couple days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33030088