To clarify Blender was originally a closed source private software created at Dutch studio Not a Number (NaN). Which Ton Roosendaal was software engineer at and

To clarify Blender was originally a closed source private software created at Dutch studio Not a Number (NaN). Which Ton Roosendaal was software engineer at and helped create blender. The source code was then releases by NaN under some licencing scheme. Only after a fund raising drive to buy the code for something like a few hundred thousand dollars from NaN and re-release it under an OSS licence did Blender become open source. Its important to understand that Animation Studios hire the majority of Computer Graphics researchers, Programmers and Artists. Without the commercial Animation industry there would be a small fraction of the research and innovation that we have today. And also a fraction of the innovative open source Computer Graphics projects that we have. Open source projects like Open SubDiv (Pixar), Ptex (Disney), Open VDM (Dreamworks), and many others are all projects that are created by Animation Studios and would not be possible without the funding and expertise that these studios have.