Quality 3d animation software is available to anyone with Blender. If someone gets this renderer working as an addon (which will obviously happen) artist will get a side by side comparison of what their work looks like with both cycles and a professional studio product, for free. This is win, win, win for Blender, OSS and the community.
Not just that, I am assuming that there are parts of that code, that will be analysed by the Cycles developers, to enhance Cycles to improve it.
Renderman for Blender:
https://rmanwiki.pixar.com/pages/viewpage.action?mobileBypas...