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Autodesk Acquires Alias
eggegg is one of many readers to write to tell us that "Autodesk, of AutoCAD and 3dsmax fame, is reporting that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Alias, makers of Maya and MotionBuilder. Will Autodesk use the inherited expertise and codebase to finally develop their product line for the platforms most of their customer base would prefer, or does this mean the end of development of Alias products on OSX and Linux?"
Blender, as already stated elsewhere in these threads, is a bit the Gimp/OpenOffice/Linux of the 3D world, meaning free, capable, evolving, but in no way equal to their closed source, commercial top predators (that would be Photoshop, MS Office 12, MS Vista). Of course this does NOT mean that they a worthless projects! They ARE growing, getting better and being used more and more.
At a certain moment, they will simply be "good enough". For a lot of real world use, GIMP, OpenOffice and Linux are already there (how many of you actually BUY the commercial packages because the FLOSS packages cannot handle something you absolutely need? Pirating SW does not count...). Now, Blender might not actually be quite there yet, but if the recent spurt of activity can be maintained (Blender recently got softbodies, a hair system, a fluid system to name just three and is doing wonderfull stuff in the animation area), in a year's time I think we'll start seeing more and more stuff produced in Blender (hobby and student stuff, indy pre-vis etc. One has to start somewhere...). You should try it out (Test Builds in the blender.org forum area). The interface has greatly improved over the last couple of years as well so that old horse should stop being flogged.