Why Do Computer Graphics Studios Use Licensed Renderers And Software?

There are a combination of reasons why a someone or a company will use a commercial program over a free open source.
A commercial program you can support for from the company that sells it along with training. Also you get updates that are fully tested before they are released. Other reasons why is you have control over the software to secure it and you have an industry standard that many other use for the same purpose of creating graphics.
Although open source software might give you the same function for creating graphics it does not do many of the things I listed above. A couple key things that open source won’t do is have a good support like a commercial one which is important to any company that is in this business. The other issue is open source even though it might work on any computer has a problem where main line companies just don’t use it and it most likely not compatible with other graphics programs they might be running or have run in the past. There are other things of concern but I believe by now you get why the commercial software is still the one of choice.
Hope that helps!!

Speaking as a system administrator for an academic theatre department that uses a lot of proprietary software when FOSS alternatives are freely available… even though we have a perennially tight budget…
The main problem my faculty run into with the free alternatives is that the interface just isn’t as good and as polished as the proprietary stuff. The free software may work just as well… or even better… but that doesn’t matter because they can’t figure out how to use the darn things.
Additionally, in many cases, the proprietary software may be the only thing the person has ever used and they may have been using it for a long time. I have people here that have been using AutoCAD for literally 25+ years.
Finally, speaking as the poor schlub who has to support these people, the free software has sucky support. Period. I like being able to pick up the phone and call Adobe or AutoDesk when I have problems. I have had software developers (albeit smaller developers) rewrite entire segments of their product just to support us. No FOSS community ever did that for us. The only advice we get is “well… you can just modify it yourself.” Which would be great, if we had the money to hire a software engineer.

Because companies believe freeware/opensource isnt profitable.