This sadly happened in Germany, actually. We have a state sponsored weather forecast service, who also released a free Android (and possibly IOS) app. They were successfully sued by a for-profit commercial weather app (that even uses the publicly available data from the state sponsored service).
Now the state sponsored app is required by law to not be free. Last I checked it costs about two Euros.
What the parent meant here is that competitors would have sued because Blender is free and open source. Which isn't the case for the companies you listed. More like the makers of Maya, 3dmax, etc.
Speaking of monopolies, the makers (or rather buyer) of Maya and 3dsmax is now Autodesk.
They both used to be owned by different companies, and benefited from the competition.
But now they're owned by the same monopolistic giant Autodesk, so they're both entrenched in their captive markets, and have stagnated in comparison to how they used to evolve when there was competition.
Autodesk really hates Blender, and has always spread a lot of FUD about it. For example, Ton has told me that Autodesk's sales people falsely told their customers that Blender's GPL license means that any content you develop in Blender is automatically licensed under the GPL, so you can't use it to make copyrighted artwork, which is bullshit.
There's such a long history of Autodesk spreading FUD about Blender, that when Ton Roosendaal was attacked by a ceiling tile during his talk at the 2014 Blender Conference, he joked that it was Autodesk! ;)
You could argue all the money printing and zero interest rates gave companies easy capital access. People rail on them for doing share buybacks, however these companies have also went on to capture international markets, and even companies. Block (fka Square) acquiring Afterpay (an Aussie company) comes to mind.
> Block (fka Square) acquiring Afterpay (an Aussie company) comes to mind.
A powerful weapon indeed
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it's unfortunate that people prefer to Flag comments rather than downvote when they disagree with someone, it feels like i'm being silenced for bringing counter arguments to the table
In the US the commercial competitors would have sued the government for anti-competitive practices if they had sponsored Blender.