Yeah this discussion is pretty interesting. I was wondering what what happening with development as well. Taichi is cool tech, that if I had to be honest, it seems like they lacked direction of how to monetize it. For example they tried doing this "Taitopia thing" https://taitopia.design/ (which is already EOL'ed).

IMO if they had focused from the beginning on ML similar to Mojo, they would be in a better place.

It developed out of a dissertation at MIT (honestly a pretty damn impressive one IMO) and it seems like without some sort of significant support from universities, foundations or corporations, it would be pretty difficult to “monetize” - these in turn require some sort of substantial industry adoption or dogfooding it in some other job/contracts, which is tough I assume.

Hi there. I help there. ProRender is still very important as it has hardware accelerated raytracing while Cycles does not yet on AMD.

Furthermore we're focusing our efforts on ProRender going forward through USD. https://github.com/GPUOpen-LibrariesAndSDKs/BlenderUSDHydraA... Adding USD workflows to blender and other apps while using ProRender for the rendering solution in USD.

I think what you're referring to is paying for -support- There is no blender version of "Red Hat" that companies can rely on to deliver fixes or support.

Actually this is exactly what we did with the renderman addon for Blender. And AFAIK how other renderer addons work.

Frankly if you want to be doing any meaningful computation in your addon it probably makes sense to go this route and have the closed source part in C while the addon "bridge" is python.