Hey, Sam, from Threedee here; today, we’ll discuss why Blender is free and how it is free.
It all starts with Ton Roosendaal, a Dutch software developer and now a film producer.
Roosendaal studied Industrial Design in Eindhoven before founding the animation studio "NeoGeo" in 1989. It quickly became the largest 3D animation studio in the Netherlands.
At the time, there was a Japanese video game developer with the same name, but they were not related.
In the same year, he wrote a ray tracer called Traces for the Amiga, and in 1995 he decided to start the development of in-house tools for 3D animation based on Traces and tools that NeoGeo had already written.
This tool was later named "Blender."
Fun fact Number1: The name Blender was inspired by a song, by the Swiss electronic band Yello, from the album Baby, which NeoGeo used in its showreel
On January 1, 1998, Blender was released publicly online as freeware. NeoGeo was later shut down, and its client contracts were taken over by another company.
After NeoGeo's dissolution, Ton founded “Not a Number Technologies (NaN)” in June 1998 to further market and develop Blender. At the core of NaN was a desire to create and distribute a compact, cross-platform 3D application for free.
This was a revolutionary concept at the time, as most commercial 3D applications cost thousands of dollars.
NaN’s business model involved providing commercial products and services around Blender.
After great success in a Siggraph conference in early 2000, NaN secured financing of four point 5 million euros from venture capitalists.
Unfortunately, NaN’s ambitions and opportunities did not match the company’s capabilities and the market realities of the time. This over-extension resulted in restarting of NaN with new investor funding and a smaller company in April 2001. NaN’s first commercial software product, Blender Publisher, was launched six months later.
Due to low sales and the ongoing challenging economic climate, the new NaN investors decided to shut down all operations in early 2002, signaling the end of Blender development.
Fun fact Number2: It was clear that NaN would not survive, but as a last personal touch, the artists and developers decided to add a 3D model of a chimpanzee head named “Monkey,” It was created by Willem-Paul van Overbruggen, who named it Suzanne, after the orangutan in the Kevin Smith film Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
However, Ton could not justify leaving the Blender to die. Since restarting a company with a sufficiently large team of developers was not feasible, Ton Roosendaal founded the non-profit organization Blender Foundation in March 2002.
The Blender Foundation’s primary goal was to find a way to continue developing and promoting Blender as a community-based open-source project.
In July 2002, Ton managed to get the NaN investors to agree to a unique Blender Foundation plan to attempt to release Blender as an open source.
The “Free Blender” campaign sought to raise €100,000 so that the Foundation could buy the rights to the Blender source code and intellectual property rights from the NaN investors and subsequently release Blender to the open source community.
With an enthusiastic group of volunteers, among them several ex-NaN employees, a fundraising campaign was launched for “Free Blender.”
The campaign reached the €100,000 goal in only seven weeks. On Sunday, October 13, 2002, Blender was released to the world under the terms of the GNU GPL.
Today, Blender is free and open-source software primarily developed by its community and 24 employees employed by the Blender Institute, all led by Blender’s original creator, Ton Roosendaal.
It’s free, and because of Ton, and the community's passion for not letting the project die, Ton always wanted more people to be creative.
The Blender foundation makes money from people and companies who donate to its development.
Due to its licensing, it will be free forever; no one can buy a Blender.
This was a short history of why Blender is free and how it makes money being a free product.
I hope this blog was informative and I healed your curiosity.
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