This article provides a defense for using the GPL, instead of the recent wave of projects moving towards "source-available" licenses that often prohibit commercial use or hosting of software. The...
This article provides a defense for using the GPL, instead of the recent wave of projects moving towards "source-available" licenses that often prohibit commercial use or hosting of software.
The article is by Ton Roosendaal, the chairman of the Blender Foundation.
Interestingly, Blender started out as an in-house tool, written by an animation studio (NeoGeo). After NeoGeo was acquired by another company, Ton took Blender and formed a new company, hoping to follow a free product/commercial support model. While this goal was not met, a community crowdfunding campaign was successful in transferring Blender to the newly formed Blender Foundation, which then released Blender under the GPL.
After this, Blender has consistently seen slow and steady growth. In recent years, it's seen increasing use in commercial animation studios; notably, the feature film Next Gen was made almost entirely with Blender.
I don't think you can really call Blender's development slow. In the time since it first became open source, it has gained capabilities for video editing, compositing, tons of sculpting tools, a...
I don't think you can really call Blender's development slow. In the time since it first became open source, it has gained capabilities for video editing, compositing, tons of sculpting tools, a video game engine, a ton of interface changes, and an entirely new rendering engine. They have been one of the fastest moving open source projects out there.
2 new rendering engines if we're counting Eevee. And if we're counting Eevee we should probably drop the game engine. Eevee's seriously impressive for a real time renderer.
2 new rendering engines if we're counting Eevee. And if we're counting Eevee we should probably drop the game engine. Eevee's seriously impressive for a real time renderer.
I phrased that badly, sorry. A better phrase would have been slow acceptance. I personally use Blender almost every day, and I've been using 2.8 for the last few months now. I'm amazed at how far...
I phrased that badly, sorry. A better phrase would have been slow acceptance.
I personally use Blender almost every day, and I've been using 2.8 for the last few months now. I'm amazed at how far Blender has come in just the last year. Eevee is game-changing.
This article provides a defense for using the GPL, instead of the recent wave of projects moving towards "source-available" licenses that often prohibit commercial use or hosting of software.
The article is by Ton Roosendaal, the chairman of the Blender Foundation.
Interestingly, Blender started out as an in-house tool, written by an animation studio (NeoGeo). After NeoGeo was acquired by another company, Ton took Blender and formed a new company, hoping to follow a free product/commercial support model. While this goal was not met, a community crowdfunding campaign was successful in transferring Blender to the newly formed Blender Foundation, which then released Blender under the GPL.
After this, Blender has consistently seen slow and steady growth. In recent years, it's seen increasing use in commercial animation studios; notably, the feature film Next Gen was made almost entirely with Blender.
I don't think you can really call Blender's development slow. In the time since it first became open source, it has gained capabilities for video editing, compositing, tons of sculpting tools, a video game engine, a ton of interface changes, and an entirely new rendering engine. They have been one of the fastest moving open source projects out there.
2 new rendering engines if we're counting Eevee. And if we're counting Eevee we should probably drop the game engine. Eevee's seriously impressive for a real time renderer.
I phrased that badly, sorry. A better phrase would have been slow acceptance.
I personally use Blender almost every day, and I've been using 2.8 for the last few months now. I'm amazed at how far Blender has come in just the last year. Eevee is game-changing.
Here's a demo of 2.8 and its real-time render engine Eevee.