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 $2000 from one person. Most of it was from the community; there were no corporations involved.
28 Comments
Cool and huge interview...but I think thats a little bit not true that blender in 1995-2000 was absolutely freeware...it was freeware on Solaris, BSD and other UNIX platforms, but for MS windows it was as shareware (the saving was not possible if you don't pay 100$:)..it;s clearly written in 1.60 release notes .but it;s just kinda
small thing...anyway
cool interview!
It's a good time to update the Ton Roosendaal article at wikipedia ;-)
Awesome interview, I never read large amounts of text, but I this case I readed it all and that on a early morning at school. :)
Awesome! It was quite nostalgic to read the first part about the freeware, closed-source blender. I remember it!
Excellent interview. Thanks Bart, the magazine, and of course Ton!
This is a very good interview.
I´ve always read about Blender´s history via a bunch of sites, but nothing is better than read Ton himself tell us about his point of view of everything related to our beloved Blender. =D
Thanks a lot!
cheers
Can't see anything about future usability projects. Event system recode could help, but it's only one part of it.
What a great interview, kept me interested for the whole six pages! Thanks Ton, Bart, and Daniel.
I'm delighted to read that other open movie projects are planned soon. It's great what came out of the last one, I have no doubt that the next one will be grat also and push Blender forward in the process.
Though with only a small user base compared to the modelling/rendering side, I would love to see some sort of open game project sometimes. Perhaps after the Ogre integration and the other exciting additions to the game engine that could be an interesting project.
second what sanne said.
Long live the King!
Great interview! :)
For all of us old schoolers it brings back memories....
I remember the old website blender was on...black backgrond..it was so ugly
I agree with Enriqolonius - in this "fast times" i think blender have an intresting and "long" history
and an very intresting future in front.
and
third what sanne said! ;)
Good Read!
Excellent Interview
Very good!
//Mathias
Read it, part that I like a lot is the open studio idea. Also wondering how they would qualify people for orange 2.
Great interveiw! It's always interesting to see what the main developer has to say about Blender's history.
Fantastic Interview!!!
Haha, very Ton indeed.
btw. The old website never was on black.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://neogeo.nl
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://blender.nl
Great interview, very interesting... yeah, I was wondering how on earth Ton could keep doing all the things he has been doing. I feel relief that Ton is going to delegate some more of his responsibilities to others , just so that he doesn't burn out or worse have a stroke.
Ton, your the programmer of programmers I am sure, thanks for giving us this marvelous tool to work with. ANd thanks Bart and Daniel James for sharing this with us!!!!
Every time Ton talks about Blender I felt more secure about the open source project and the strong of the way Blender took.
Every time I felt more confident that Blender will change the 3D world forever with the open source ItÅ› not so a question of being free, itÅ› a question of the quality of the software itself. Open source is made with love, for all and to everyone.
This article was so crispy! :D We love Ton.
Oh, and I'm the bloke that remarked many times about non-open audio. I still think it's important that Blender start looking at audio more. Is anyone with me? Maybe we can make it happen! Audio is actually very easy conceptually.
Ton!
If you are in need of a professional in Blender who will work for love of the project (i.e. no fee whatsoever), let me know.
Just ask on this blender forum for "Dude man" (or this email - my real email this time, he he ;) )
I always appreciated what you and the other developers did, and since I'm such a lousy programmer - but an excellent modeller/animator/FX - I should put my efforts where it will pay off best.
Call me when the time comes, give me some early notice, and I'll see if I can clear my busy schedule for ya!
Take care, and thanks!!!!
Dude man
i second what Bmud said, i am a very beginner programmer and thats why i didnt got any further yet with my "dreams" on this side but once i proposed a blender and puredata integration to give the blender users contact to a audio interface also not only graphics, maybe i was wrong maybe not but the truth is im to amateur as a program yet to go for it so i am better improving my skills as a programmer before any attempts on this side, but if someday i have the knowledge to do something like that i would be very proud of it.
Very cool interview and the studio idea is something that can really grow and benefit the whole OSS comunity, not only blender, thanks for sharing.
Quite an awesome interview, and the cool part is that Ton has already been on the leading edge once with the first release of an open movie, but if the open studio becomes a reality, it will be another first!
Very very cool Interview.
I think the best resumé of ever for all the Blender saga from the beginning.
My compliments Ton! ;-)
Very nice interview! I'ts always awesome to dig little bits of info about Blender's history and development =)
Best regards