People Press

Interview with Ton in Linux User & Developer Magazine

Bart ·

The Foundation

The Blender Foundation was established, to sign the deal with the investors for the licensing. When we published the sources we had to set up services; CVS, mailing lists, making sure that development can happen. That was during the first year; it was very interesting to witness how this process started. Nobody knew the sources, and they were hardly documented. They were completely stuffed with Dutch comments in the code. Why would you do comments in English if it was never the purpose to publish the code? You need a lot of work to get that code into a shape that fits better for open source development.

I also decided to be at a distance for the first six months, to give people the opportunity to mess around, otherwise everything would have fallen back to me. It’s important that people should feel invited to participate. Even if they do really bad, horrible things, you have to allow them, because that’s the way they learn how the software works.

It was also great to watch the dynamics of an open source project, really embracing the features that people would like to see in the software. It’s quite different from a corporate approach. A lot of work has been done on the interface, trying not to lose the workflow for power users, but trying to get more access for new users. A lot of people thought that was important, so it was just added.

The other thing that was surprising was that the gaming part of Blender didn’t get a lot of attention. Most of the focus was on the core tools, like modelling and rendering. All our ideas about having an interactive creation tool – Blender still has a game engine built in, and game logic – were only really interesting to a very small minority of users. It’s still so; there’s an active group working on the game engine, but it’s small.

The core Blender development team, those that have write access to CVS, is now a little over fifty people. Around that is about one hundred people who provide patches. Of course, because Blender has a very large user base, we have thousands of people providing test reports, and testing builds. That whole cycle, of making stable software releases, is something we do really well. Blender has been getting a good name as a stable platform to work with.

It’s impossible to estimate the size of the user community; we don’t have user registration. Regarding our own distribution from the blender.org website, if we make a new release about 200,000 people download it within a month. That’s the core of the user base, who want to have the latest version. Then there are mirrors, and most (if not all) Linux distributions have Blender. All of that we don’t count. Then there is download.com, and Macintosh websites; they all distribute Blender.

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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