People Press

Interview with Ton in Linux User & Developer Magazine

Bart ·

A dot-com phoenix

If you did something with the internet community and free software in that period, it also attracted attention from investment companies and venture capitalists; it was the dot-com era. In the Netherlands, we had a big bang when one internet provider went public. It was valued at something like two billion euro, and only had 100,000 subscribers. Every subscriber was worth 20,000 euro – that was ridiculous!

So I thought ‘OK, let’s give it a try, you never know!’ We got funding and set up the company Not a Number. We wanted to keep the core of the software freely available, and develop professional services around it. But the month we started, the internet bubble burst. After that, the people who had invested in Not a Number got a little bit scared, and all the beautiful plans had to be condensed into a very short period, because now we had to make money – and that was quite difficult. In 2002, Not a Number closed for good. We were making some money, but it was not enough to be self-supporting.
Then we had a couple of months that were a really big black hole. I managed to get the investors in the company, who by then owned 90% of the shares, to agree to make Blender open source, licensing it as GNU GPL. They agreed on this under two conditions.

One was the licence, because I told them that the GNU GPL was the most radical and strict licence in the market, and was ‘barely commercial’. Of course people can do business with it, but the investors were afraid that other companies could take the asset and create commercial software out of Blender. The GPL is very strict about mixing proprietary software with software that is under the GPL. So the chance that any company would pick up Blender and market it was pretty minimal.

The other condition was a fee of 100,000 euro, which wasn’t a lot compared to what they had invested, but it was (most likely) an amount they wouldn’t have received if they had sold Blender to another company. Surprisingly enough, we got the money in only seven weeks – it was an amazing time. For the Blender community we had a sort of membership, a ‘founding member’ ticket for 50 euro. You could download some extras and goodies, and that membership had some kind of status. That’s what we sold most of. We also had a lot of publicity, on Slashdot for instance. Every Slashdot posting brought a lot of donations, but these were all small – five, ten or fifteen dollars. I think in total we had about four or five thousand dollars in small donations, and a couple of big ones – we had $2000 from one person. Most of it was from the community; there were no corporations involved.

Author Bart
I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Community Lead at n8n.
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