> I wonder what will be the next category of open source to pull ahead?

KiCad, for PCB design. They have been making massive improvements over the last few years, and with proprietary solutions shutting down (Eagle) or being unaffordable (Altium) Kicad is now by far the best option for both hobbyists and small companies.

With the release of KiCad 5 in 2018 it went from being "a pain to use to, but technically sufficient" to being a genuine option for less-demanding professionals. Since then they've been absolutely killing it, with major releases happening once a year and bringing enough quality-of-life improvements that it is actually hard to keep track of all of them.

From the type of new features it is very obvious that a lot of professional users are now showing interest in the application, and as we've seen with Blender a trickle of professional adoption can quickly turn into a flood which takes over the entire market.

KiCad still has a long way to go when it comes to complex high-speed boards (nobody in their right mind would use it to design an EPYC motherboard, for example), but it is absolutely going to steamroll the competition when it comes to the cookie-cutter 2/4/6 layer PCBs in all the everyday consumer products.

> Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche.

I can think of a few more: Git obsoleted an entire category of commercial software seemingly almost overnight, VSCode has become by far the most widely used IDE (not entirely open source, though), TeX still dominates mathematical typesetting AFAIK (as it has for as long as computers have been used for that), (lib)ffmpeg is used everywhere for video/audio transcoding and between them nginx and apache still account for the majority of webservers. Most popular programming language compilers/interpreters/runtimes are open source too, of course.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, Blender has done far better than most open source software but Maya is still very much the industry standard. I don't think we can realistically say that Maya is beaten until Blender is battle-proven to the same degree, on the most demanding real-world production workloads (think Pixar/Weta), which for now it hasn't been.

As a game developer, I'm really rooting for open source game engines.

Unity and Unreal are dinosaurs that target the shrinking console market. Godot is being built in their image. My hope is that something more versatile like Bevy becomes common so that we have something that could potentially compete with the next generation of Roblox.

Video editing? Adobe has set themselves up for failure there, everyone wants an alternative

Davinci Resolve is probably competitive with Premiere, but while free it's not actually open source. But either a viable competitor catching up or Davinci publishing the code could change that fast

> Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche

OBS is on line 2 ....

> Meanwhile, in other niches, Microsoft Office still beats open source office suites like LibreOffice; Photoshop isn't about to give up its crown to GIMP; Lightroom isn't losing to Darktable; and FreeCAD isn't even in the rear view mirror of Solidworks.

Tbf, everything starts somewhere and all the proprietary apps you listed were not instant market leaders.

I can and do use all those FOSS tools just fine both as a hobbyist and professionally, my needs are meet. Others may not find the same, but I suspect there's just a lot of stickyness preventing even trying new workflows.

Possibly Audacity, given the direction v4 is taking. Great video essay / update here: https://youtu.be/QYM3TWf_G38

>FreeCAD isn't even in the rear view mirror of Solidworks.

I think FreeCAD might be on a distant hilltop in their rearview these days, check it out again.

>>It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete

Hadn’t heard that. How many AAA vfx studios have left Maya for Blender?

I’m rooting for gimp but they are truly a decade behind photoshop. I don’t know how they can compete. Luckily it does not seem like they are in the market for professionals so the need to match Photoshop isn’t quite as high

> It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete.

really? I haven't done 3D rendering in a long time, admittedly, but back then Maya and Lightwave were miles ahead of Blender. Rhino3D too. Even 3DSMax was better. Lightwave seems to have sadly fallen off (unfortunately, IMO it was the best at one point, had excellent ray tracing). I didn't really Blender had come such a long way -- that's great.

Since you mention niches: Adobe InDesign has no OSS competition at all, and Illustrator is still much better than Inkscape.

Probably requires something that is almost there then a sponsor(s) to throw in developers or funding to get the rest of the way. On the EDA side CERN did a lot to lift Kicad to the point of being a credible alternative that could breakthrough like Blender. Both those projects are over 30 years old and for a lot of that time were dismissed as too difficult to use or lacking in features. FreeCAD is only 23 years old. I don't know what the code base is like but if a large org put a couple of good devs into it for a few years who knows.

It must be difficult when so much management is short sighted and focused on delivering short term profits for shareholders. Even academia is run like a business now.

Unless a privately held rogue company like Valve got interested its probably going to have to wait for a government/ngo/scientific. Industry, particularly the tech industry, is notorious for leaching of free and open source software and in some cases building entire businesses on it and not giving back.

The problem with FreeCAD and every other free/open source MCAD project of note is the Open Cascade kernel they are built on. While Open Cascade is fairly mature, it has dealbreaker issues in a few key areas: fillets cannot consume connected faces and may fail for a number of other reasons, cylindrical and spherical faces require seams which often cause issues with boolean operations, and shapes like helixes are also often troublesome.

Onshape has blown me away with its browser interface and how quick it all loads. And as long as your projects are public, it's free.

agreed!

take a look at https://Plasticity.xyz. It's not open-source, but it's got a small, highly dedicated team behind it. It's built on Solidworks' kernel, so it's quite robust.

Also take a look at solverspace, caligula, FreeCAD, ...

IDK how they compare to professional CAD tools, but I've heard good things about FreeCAD and OpenSCAD. I know that some people use Blender for CAD work, and there are even some extensions to make it easier, but I'm dubious that the representation of meshes that Blender uses are well-suited for CAD applications.

Blender is a decent option for low effort 3d modeling for 3d printing in my experience

Same, but I don't think it's possible without a large and sustained investment into a free geometric modelling kernel, which can probably be only done by a government.

Parasolid is powering practically every major CAD system. Its development started in 1986 and it's still actively developed. The amount of effort that goes into those things is immense (39 years of commercial development!) and I don't believe it can be done pro-bono in someone's spare time. What's worse, with this kind of software there is no "graceful degradation": while something like a MIP solver can be useful even if it's quite a bit slower than Gurobi, a kernel that can't model complex lofts and fillets is not particularly useful.

3D CAD is much harder than Blender and less amenable to open source development.

FreeCAD is the front-runner for me.

KiCAD was also a meh ECAD FOSS alternative 7-8 years ago, now it is by far the tool of choice for regular ECAD designs. I can see FreeCad getting there by 2030.

Something that I've daydreamed of in the past is making a new constructive solid geometry "kernel" around which a CAD application could be wrapped based on projective geometric algebra (PGA).

The algorithms it enables are fundamentally more capable and robust than traditional kernels based on linear algebra (vectors and matrices). You can do really fancy things like interpolating in space and time robustly, find extrema in high-dimensional phase spaces, etc...

This could potentially allow straightforward and robust solvers for kinematics, optimal shape finding, etc...

Every few decades there's a "step change" where some new algorithm or programming paradigm sweeps away the old approach because suddenly a hobbyist can do the same thing solo that took dozens of developers a decade in the past. I suspect (but cannot prove) that PGA is one of those things.

Plasticity is the closest thing to this, I think. It uses Parasolid, which Blender does not, and supports xNURBS, which Blender does not.

You may be interested in CAD Sketcher: https://www.cadsketcher.com/

You're on point that there's a tremendous amount of money captures by Autodesk for CAD software that could be better directed at the open source community instead.

Software like OpenSCAD and FreeCAD are obviously not suitable for much commercial work, and have very irritating limitations for hobbyist work, in my mind a big part of that is the UI and Blender has a good and established UI at this point so I'd love to see the open source CAD that provides an alternative to vendor lock in come from a Blender add-on instead of a separate program.

I am no expert but as I understand it the primary difficulty with developing good alternatives to commercial CAD software lie in the development of an effective geometric kernel.

It seems to me that if a developer of an opensource CAD program develops it as a Blender add-on they can effectively outsource the remainder of the development efforts to the Blender community while focus can be made on the CAD kernel itself.

I think at the very least they've found those rare individuals who can both code well and manage well. There are countless open source project leaders who might be the most knowledgeable person in the world on that area but have no idea how to communicate and collaborate in an open-source setting, especially as the project gets popular and attracts people who're detrimental (not necessarily malicious) to the project's growth.

Yeah this is a really good question. I'd love to know more about that too. There's some good history on the website here [1].

The creator apparently was selling it as freemium software in 1998, and then the bubble burst and the corp shutdown in 2002. But the creator created a non-profit called the Blender Foundation, launched a Free Blender campaign [2] (the forum post is still up!) to raise money from its users and bought out the rights to the software from the investors.

[1] https://www.blender.org/about/history/

[2] https://blenderartists.org/t/free-blender-campaign-launched/...

I've used blender since 1999. It's my favorite open source software. Simply amazing

Can you link to a Blender issue?

It might be possible to reproduce the same effect in EEVEE using geometry nodes. I know people have done that for automatic level of detail work. That being said, IDK if subsurf as a geometry node will take a non-constant number of iterations.

But after that, all the other things on the page are AWESOME! I’m super stoked about the proper HDR support and all the new node improvements.

Looks like they picked a bad day to do a major release.

That's the whole internet now. That or Anubis.

If you don’t work in the industry, you have zero chance of accurately evaluating whether or not, or how, it will be impacted by any new technology.

The fact that it “seems easy” is a great flag that it probably isn’t.

"AI will make this pointless" is so exhausting.

Directors spend a LOT of effort trying to keep continuity and that's the weakest part of AI.

What blender and other CGI software gets for free is continuity. The 3D model does not change without explicitly making it change.

Until we get AI which can regenerate the same model from one scene to the next, the use of AI in CGI will be severely limited.

I design projections for independent theatre in Baltimore. I use AI in my workflows where it can help me and won’t compromise on the quality of what I’m making. I frequently use AI to upscale crappy footage, to interpolate frames in existing video (for artistic purposes, never with documentary archival stuff) and very occasionally to create wholesale clips in situations where video models can do what I need.

I recently used WAN to generate a looping clip of clouds moving quickly, something that’s difficult to do in CGI and impossible to capture live action. It worked out because I didn’t have specific demands other than what I just said, and I wasn’t asking for anything too obscure.

At this point, I expect the quality of local video models (the only kind I’m willing to work with professionally) to go up, but prompt adherence seems like a tough nut to crack, which makes me think it may be a while before we have prosumer models that can replace what I do in Blender.

If AI is at the point where it is exactly as capable of your average junior 3D professional in 10 years, it will probably have automated a ton (double digit percentage?) of current jobs such that nothing is safe. There's a lot of complexity, it's fairly long time horizon, it's very visually detailed, it's creative and subjective, and there's not a lot of easily accessible high quality training data.

It's like 2D art with more complexity and less training data. Non-AI 2D art and animation tools haven't been made irrelevant yet, and don't look like they will be soon.

As someone who's actually used Blender for small video projects, I'm fairly confident you'll still need this type of tool even with AI assistance doing some of the work in it, especially for at least the next 10 years.

AI coding agents didn't make IDEs obsolete. They just added plugins to some existing IDEs and spawned a few new ones.

Can there please be one post on this godforsaken website where there is no attempt to shoehorn it into the AI craze?

You build apps for Shopify.

You are asking for industry predictions from industry professionals in an industry you know nothing about while assuming a lot about that industry.

Why do you think they should do all the heavy lifting for you?

You might as well ask ChatGPT what it thinks because it seems you already have an idea of what you want the answer to be.

What will AI train on?