Article on Slashdot "Are Forced Subscriptions Driving 3D Users To Open Source Tools?"

[Kunda1]

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.

Source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/11/0 ... urce-tools

[freedman]

I feel good every time I open FreeCAD because the major CAD companies have been abusing their position for years.
This goes along the path of another link with "Blender founder (Ton Roosendaal) Keynote speech from BlenderCon '19".

I say this is a warning to the big companies. It will take us some time but " We will replace you if you treat us badly". I just noticed it today with Mozilla, since their beginning they have allowed folks to turn off automatic updates so we can manage our own computer. Now they make updates manditory and do pop-ups to annoy the user, a total abuse of power, I would say it's time for a new company to replace Firefox, hopefully a GIT driven open source company that respects their users.

[vocx]

... pretty much forced you to use Windows X in terms of OS choice in the past, ...

Wut? Is Windows X supposed to be Windows 10? Or is this some special meaning?

Anyway, as to the article I just want to say, well, that's great, hopefully more people discover free software.

I think in many parts of the world users don't really have a choice about selecting the software they need for their work. They are indoctrinated from very young to use closed sourced tools that run on Windows and that's it. Even if theoretically you can use an open source tool and save money to the company, many bosses don't care about that, and they want to continue using one software or the other, just because they are familiar with it. Some shops would rather get some pirated copies of SolidWorks for basic 3D models, instead of doing the equivalent with FreeCAD.

[DeepSOIC]

Wut? Is Windows X supposed to be Windows 10? Or is this some special meaning?

I suppose it means "a rather specific version of Windows"

[freedman]

Another thought comes to mind; Forum members here have read some of my posts, they might have noticed that I'm really annoyed (or annoying) when it comes to talking about internet connections and security. Part of the reason I'm so crazed is because this internet connection we use here while working together in a friendly way is the same connection the big companies use to punish us once they hook us on software. Some days I feel like tearing the wires out of the wall but I know I would just have to put them back to get on the forum.