I Think You Meant Marginal Cost

Rumored Buzz on Is Fusion 360 Free For Hobbyists Definition Of Woke Ideology ExposedBlender is mostly meshes, but it can already have other geometry types like NURBS. You can convert a nurbs object to a mesh, but the modeling process and data format is totally different. I'm imagining that the solid modeling system would be a separate mode type like that. Those are all fixed costs, the cost of development is the same, regardless of whether you have 5 or 500 users. I think you meant "marginal cost", and in software it mostly comes from the cost of engineers and infrastructure that maintain, create, and deliver the software. Nowadays that includes bandwidth, storage, and compute for any cloud component. Software is only zero marginal cost if you create it, release it, and never touch it again. Granted someone is paying for this, or I have already paid for it out of my taxes, but the listed hobbies can be done for free with enough effort. Maybe it wouldn't have happened if ALL of its users paid some amount of money to use it. Or even better, it wouldn't have happened if a batch of the free tier users didn't abuse the licensing agreements. Why would you move your product into the cloud if it only increased your marginal costs? You move into the cloud to increase your marginal revenue. But note that the cost to design the bicycle is not part of the calculation there- because it doesn't depend on how many bicycles I build from that design. You have to realize that companies like Autodesk keep so many products alive even when they are losing money on them for years, quite thanklessly. The hidden subsidies of advertising monetization. Data collection have done an excellent job of this. In Autodesk's case, it was enterprise customers paying tens and hundreds of thousands for license seats, so that private parties could use it for free. The thing is there's some tools and technologies that humanity deserves to offer itself (a.k.a to develop a high quality OSS offering). Don't get scared by this statement, just bare with me for a second and assume it to be true. Humanity has offered itself OSS/copyfree/patent free technological gifts like an OS kernel, an SCM tool, an electronic CAD software, ML/data science packages, the wheel, etc. I posit that we need to produce long lasting artifacts that anyone, anywhere, can use and reproduce, especially if those artifacts are core to reaching our current technological level. This way, 50, 100 or 1000 years from now, we'll all have been the better for it. Your implication here seems to be that Autodesk can't possibly be doing something bad because they have "families to feed", get a grip man. The idea that a billion dollar company is somehow financially equivalent to a mom-and-pop grocery store just a few lost purchases away from ruin and going through hard times is insane. People have got to get it through their heads that billion dollar companies do not operate by the same constraints as the rest of us, they aren't charging money because they need to, but because they can.