Are Forced Subscriptions Driving 3D Users To Open Source Tools?

'Slashdot reader dryriver writes:

More and more professional 3D software like 3DMax, Maya, AutoCAD
(Autodesk) and Substance Painter (Adobe) is now only available on a
monthly or yearly subscription basis — you cannot buy any kind of
perpetual license for these industry standard 3D tools anymore, cannot
offline install or activate the tools, and the tools also phone home
every few days over the internet to see whether you have "paid your
rent". Stop paying your rent, and the software shuts down, leaving you
unable to even look at any 3D project files you may have created with
software.

This has caused so much frustration, concern and anxiety among 3D
content creators that, increasingly, everybody is trying to replace
their commercial 3D software with Open Source 3D tools. Thankfully,
open source 3D tools have grown up nicely in recent years. Some of the
most popular FOSS 3D tools are the complete 3D suite Blender, polygon
modeling tool Wings 3D, polygon modeling tool Dust3D, CAD modeling
tool FreeCAD, PBR texturing tool ArmorPaint, procedural materials
generator Material Maker, image editing tool GIMP, painting tool
Krita, vector illustration tool Inkscape and the 2D/3D game engine
Godot Engine.

Along with these tools comes a beguiling possibility — while working
with commercial 3D tools pretty much forced you to use Windows X in
terms of OS choice in the past, all of the FOSS 3D tool alternatives
have Linux versions. This means that for the first time, professional
3D users can give Windows a miss and work with Linux as their OS
instead.

In a comment on the original submission, dryriver offers some
anecdotal evidence:

Go on any major 3D software forum on the Internet and it is filled
with enraged 3D users revolting against forced software subscriptions
and threatening to switch to FOSS Blender as soon as possible.

Some major 3D animation studios are also working Blender into their
CGI pipeline. Companies like EPIC and Nvidia have begun donating to
the Blender foundation. Its happening. The move away from commercial
closed source tools - which are expensive, stagnant and don't offer
you permanent licenses anymore - is in full swing. The fact that
Blender has an innovative GPU accelerated realtime render engine
called EEVEE that none of the commercial software has has only
accelerated this trend.

Blender is widely believed to have 2 - 3 million active users already,
and the fact that V 2.80 comes with a much more usable UI is only
accelerating things.'

-- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/11/09/064248

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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