Thomas Kobelsky's Blog

May 12, 2010

The history of Blender is quite intriguing to me. Then again, I've always been a sucker for open-sourced software and the history of under-appreciated software development. I'm not entirely sure why, but it might have something to do with just a small group of people trying to accomplish something on their own.

My last entry said something about being able to create pieces really quickly using Blender, and now I'm going to explain some of the history that I promised.

Way back in 1988 (the year I was born in, actually) a man named Ton Roosendaal co-founded a Netherlands-based 3d Animation Studio called NeoGeo (not related to the Neo Geo hardware by SNK). This company became insanely huge, and Ton decided that the in-house 3d tool they were using was becoming obsolete seven years later. In 1995, he began re-writing the tool set from scratch into a bigger/better/shinier 3d application.

This application was what later became known as Blender.

It was still very much an in-house tool for the artists, who worked alongside the programmers while refining the tool. The programmers pretty much catered the entire engine towards the in-house artists so they can work faster and more efficiently (remember, this is one of the largest 3d animation studios in Europe at the time). As the improvements went on, they didn't even notice the learning curve getting steeper.

Three years later, in 1998, Ton founded a new company called NaN (Not a Number Technologies. Explanation of name here) as a sub-company spinoff from NeoGeo to basically market Blender to outside sources. NaN's business model was providing a compact cross-platform 3d application for free, while also having a commercial version with other products and services catered to it.

Everything was going great, and NaN even attended in its fist Siggraph conference to showcase Blender in 1999. Huge interest was accumulated and NaN took off on a rollercoaster of success.

In early 2000, after another Siggraph conference, NaN had over 4.5mil EUR in the bank and began to expand very rapidly. Several months later, Blender was being supported by over 50 NaN employees from around the world, and in summer of 2000 Blender v2.0 was released. This version had the Game Engine integrated, and by the end of 2000, there were over 250,000 registered users on the NaN website.

Shortly after, NaN went bankrupt from lack of resources at the time. In April 2001, NaN was restarted with a new investor and a smaller company, which released Blender Publisher, which flopped horribly in the market during an economic crisis, and NaN was shut down.

Shutting down NaN also meant discontinuing development of Blender.

However, even with all of its shortcomings, Blender had a ton of support from the user community and the people who purchased software from NaN. Ton couldn't just let Blender disintegrate into the archives of the internets to be eaten by Cthulu, and didn't have the funding to restart another company to develop Blender, so in March of 2002 he created a non-profit organization called Blender Foundation.

Blender Foundation's first and foremost goal was figuring out how to keep Blender alive as a community-driven Open Source project. Four months after the startup, Ton set up a "Free Blender" campaign which set out to raise 100,000 EUR so the Foundation could acquire the Blender source code and intellectual property rights from the previous NaN investors. The campaign only lasted seven weeks before reaching the 100,000 EUR goal.

On Sunday October 13, 2002, Ton released Blender to the open source community (among them were several ex-NaN employees who wanted to keep Blender alive) under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

To this day, Ton Roosendaal still leads the development of Blender, which is currently in v2.5 Alpha 2 phase.

-tk

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