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.
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