7 ms·

Ton Roosendaal to step down as Blender chairman and CEO

379 points by cma 1y ago

https://www.blender.org/press/blender-foundation-announces-new-board-and-executive-director/ https://www.blender.org/press/blender-foundation-announces-n...

7373737373 1y ago
o7 I wish more businesses followed his footsteps in making their products free and open source and run by nonprofits
- groby_b 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - sterwill 1y ago
    Not bragging, but I bought the Blender Book!
  - 7373737373 1y ago
    Mr. Roosendaal himself sold me a Blender T-Shirt!
quxbar 1y ago
His work has enabled so much creativity and he gets to give great software away for free, what a chad.
heyheyhouhou 1y ago
He is such a great person and helped soo much fostering an amazing community. He will still be around and the people that will be leading Blender and its community are amazing also :)
chromakode 1y ago
Ton is a personal hero of mine. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a 3d animator because of Ton. I discovered Blender in the early 2000s as a kid. It was my first exposure to digital art tools because it was free. When Blender open sourced in 2002 it was a massive gift to kids around the world like me. (Ton was kind enough to reply to an email of mine at the time thanking him!) Ton and Blender have brought so much value to the world by making world-class creation tools available to everyone. Blender is one of the most successful open source projects of all time -- going from an underdog project notorious for difficult to use UI to a polished, ubiquitous, industry shaping tool. And never losing sight of the art; it still brings a huge smile to my face when Blender ships another Open Movie. Nearly ~25 years later, thank you again Ton.
- DoctorOW 1y ago
  > Ton is a personal hero of mine. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a 3d animator because of Ton. I discovered Blender in the early 2000s as a kid. I could've written this comment, I swear to god. I'll add that Blender is my favorite FOSS project.
  - xipho 1y ago
    I've pitched Blender to NSF Review panels and the higher ups that come by those to visit as the way science should do software. Would love to know of others as successful as this, particularly as it crosses boundries to industry.
    - rgovostes 1y ago
      Can you elaborate on how Blender exemplifies “the way science should do software”? Are you talking specifically about some aspect like community governance, user experience, code quality, etc.?
  - mstade 1y ago
    Ditto! I was introduced to blender in the late (great!) 90's and had a lot of fun with it for years before I largely gave up on working in 3d graphics and started building a career as a programmer instead. Sometimes I think of what could've been had I had the perseverance to stick with it, but mostly I'm just very grateful. Ton was a big part of that for sure, but a lot of others as well. WP (or waypay as I used to call him) who designed the Suzanne model (among a lot of other amazing artwork), Bart who was a pillar of the community and went on to found Blender Nation, and many more who really formed that community. Without it I doubt blender would be more than a footnote in the annals of history. Massive congratulations to Ton for achieving what many (including me!) never thought possible. Huge, huge kudos!
  - ghurtado 1y ago
    > I'll add that Blender is my favorite FOSS project. It couldn't be any other way. Even when you ignore the fact that it is free, Blender is literally a better modeling platform than 90% of the commercial alternatives that charge in the hundreds to thousands of dollars for their products. My favorite thing about the project is the amazing turn about that they did with the UI about 10 years ago (or whenever that was, probably longer). They turned a complete disaster of an interface into a shining example to follow, and that's about when they won everyone's hearts and minds and basically took off in popularity. For a program that does basically everything, the entire thing is one consistent, intuitive, user experience from beginning to end. I can't think of any other FOSS projects with this level of polish, and very few commercial ones.
glimshe 1y ago
Blender is more valuable to humanity than all cryptocurrencies put together.
wiz21c 1y ago
He totally deserve some rest. Blender + the GPLization of Blender have been executed perfectly. We need more people like him.
- MarsIronPI 1y ago
  I wish more non-free software could be made free and open-source when its creators go defunct or lose interest in it. Another good example that brings a smile to my face is Duelyst[1]. The company behind it went under so they published the code and assets under CC0. 1: https://github.com/open-duelyst/duelyst https://github.com/open-duelyst/duelyst
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Vinnl 1y ago
Official announcement: https://www.blender.org/press/blender-foundation-announces-new-board-and-executive-director/ https://www.blender.org/press/blender-foundation-announces-n...
- dang 1y ago
  We'll put that link in the top text as well. Thanks!
unsignedint 1y ago
Having known him for decades—not in person, but through various email exchanges when I reached out to BF—I'd say it’s a bit more than “just recognizing the name.” I’ve followed his journey since well before the OSS crowdfunding days, and it’s honestly amazing to see everything he’s built. Thankfully, it sounds like he’s not stepping away completely, which is great news. As for the new leadership, Francesco Siddi comes from an animation background and is already managing Blender Studio. I’m genuinely glad to see the organization will continue to be led by people who deeply understand the tool and its community.
foxfired 1y ago
Blender went from being the least impressive 3d software when I first downloaded it in ~2003, to disrupting the industry. In the 2010s, you could still hear people would say in forums, "but no company uses blender in the industry". That's not the case anymore. The only limitation with blender now is your own creativity. I worked with several 3D artists, and they wouldn't have had their career without starting with that blender donut tutorial. A big thanks to Ton. And don't forget that you can support the blender foundation.
- xtracto 1y ago
  Blender did everything The GIMP should have done. A very specialized software with complex UI done in a way that people WITHIN the industry praise. I also remember downloading blender during my university years back in early 2004. Man was it crap compared to Maya or 3dMax. But nowadays it is incredible.
  - II2II 1y ago
    > Blender did everything The GIMP should have done. Gimp is an amazing tool and its creators deserve our gratitude. Then there is Krita, which is another amazing tool and its creators deserve our gratitude. Then there is LibreOffice, ditto. Then there is KiCAD, ditto. Then there is ... I am not saying this to detract from Ton's contributions. I am saying this because a lot of people have made contributions to the open source world and, by extension, to the lives of many people. We shouldn't be treating this as a competition.
    - zdragnar 1y ago
      I didn't see the parent comment as downloading the gimp so much as praising something blender specifically did well. The fact that it has had more impact within the industry is the evidence to support it. Competitively, libre office has a fairly similar UI to the pre-ribbon office suite, which people at the time much preferred once the ribbon came around (before they got used to it anyway) but it hasn't had the same disruption that blender did. I suspect the file format compatibility issues and die-hard Excel fans have a lot to do with it, but it's an interesting counterpoint to the assertion that the UI is responsible for the difference in adoption rates.
fidotron 1y ago
Just another voice to say what a hero this guy is. I don't think many people appreciate just how this wasn't the easy home run it might look like with hindsight - there was quite a lot of outright Blender hate at one time, and certainly the games industry has an undercurrent of people quite bitter towards Ton personally, which I have tended to interpret most of the time as envy. In the last decade the enormous advances in the project lead to it being superficially unrecognizable, and it always reminds me more of Cubase than anything else. Scaling up development so that it got to the stage many more people could contribute was a serious achievement. My Blender 1.8 manual remains one of my most prized possessions from back when I ran that on a Linux partition and later a way out of date SGI Indigo. Good times. In any case, Ton, many thanks. A true inspiration. Edit to add: I wonder if anyone else around here was on elysiun? . . .
- mstade 1y ago
  I remember Elysiun! :o) Those were some good time. My handle back then was macke.
  - fidotron 1y ago
    You know, I am sure I remember that handle! I was "kid tripod", in the UK back then. Now I'm reminiscing about Yafray . . .
- Ylpertnodi 1y ago
  > In the last decade the enormous advances in the project lead to it being superficially unrecognizable, and it always reminds me more of Cubase than anything else. As a very long-time Cubase user, how so?
  - fidotron 1y ago
    The entire style and structure of the user interface; it has that look and feel of European audio software like Cubase or to a lesser degree Ableton. Obviously Blender used to be famously quite different from that and basically all other commercial 3D software too. I appreciate that it didn't simply attempt to turn into a Maya/3DS clone.
mempko 1y ago
Blender is my favorite free software project. I started using it in the late 90s and watched it become a powerhouse. Ton Roosendaal was clearly a great leader. Onward and upward!
lastdong 1y ago
A great example of what FOSS can achieve. Not only Blender is remarkable, but the amazing community truly reflects software for good, and we owe it all to Ton.
BoredPositron 1y ago
I remember getting some stickers at a tiny booth in 2011 at FMX. Ton was great to talk to, and I've had it installed ever since. I hope we'll see you again at FMX... I will stand in line for the free soft serve from cadnetwork and bring some over again :P Not only did the booth grow bigger every time they showed up, but the community did as well. Now we get talks and workshops, and we see Blender popping up in more and more breakdowns from the bigger VFX houses. It's been quite a journey, and I hope it continues. I doubled my yearly donation today. Godspeed.
dotnet00 1y ago
I think Blender has been one of the few pieces of software that has followed me since my early teens without me ever feeling like it went into a bad direction and managing to keep improving without changing its behavior just for the sake of change, such that I was always able to jump back in every few years without having to relearn everything.
shadowgovt 1y ago
What an absolute legend. He's earned his laurels but it's still the end of an era.
bhouston 1y ago
Ton did the most amazing job in his leadership role of Blender. Long term strategic and focused and leveraged the community to achieve the overall vision. Amazing.
bob1029 1y ago
I just got done playing around with some python automation in blender to create special parametric models for a Unity project. The tooling is unbelievably effective now. ChatGPT is also surprisingly good at writing custom blender tools and especially iterating existing ones.
boppo1 1y ago
This is big news. I hope Blender continues to thrive despite it.
pluto_modadic 1y ago
breath of fresh air compared to mullenweg or DHH.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
UncleEntity 1y ago
I think my favorite thing about Ton is he would putter around the Blender offices most of the year doing whatever he did to keep the ship running but would use his vacation time to implement some pretty far reaching changes like, the last one I remember, drag-and-drop then just be "here, have fun". He really didn't micro-manage the thing but just let The Community figure out where things needed to go, in the couple years I was involved in Blender I talked with him maybe twice on the IRC. I do wonder how much more complicated Blender has gotten over the years (to go a bit off topic) as before one could spend an afternoon tracing through the code and mostly figure out how something worked. Well, as long as you stayed away from the game engine and Video Sequence Editor as they were both kind of tacked on to serve a need and didn't get much love.
Smerity 1y ago
Ton Roosendaal is brilliant both strategically (taking a closed source codebase and growing it into the open source success story that is Blender today) but also as a person. When I was 15 or so, mid 2000s, I was heavily into the Blender community. Shortly after the closed source to open source transition I ran into a segfault. I could half heartedly sling code at the time but not enough to work out the issue I had. After noting the issue on IRC Ton personally helped tease out the bug. I _might_ have misdirected him by saying the bug occurred "with just a cube" (and he was like "Yay! Bugs are easier when they're simple cases!") but I neglected to note it was a cube subdivided half a dozen times, with a few thousand vertices ;) He had a vision and quiet persistent execution plan for Blender and the community that was far ahead of anything else in those (relatively) early days of OSS and the web. The Blender community was and is an amazing combination of technology, creativity, and positivity, and I think we owe Ton for helping steward much of it.
lyu07282 1y ago
Ton is an absolute legend, on par with Linus or Carmack in my book. They made a documentary series about Blender featuring a lot of Ton Roosendaal and his team. It is quite foreshadowing of his retirement in retrospect, highly recommended: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_dZtidLwo4&list=PLa1F2ddGya_8I8QCMCKlQUOQpgOga2nZ-&index=9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_dZtidLwo4&list=PLa1F2ddGya...
owenpalmer 1y ago
Ton has been a hero of mine ever since I started using Blender at the age of 9. That software was my childhood. I became very emotional watching him hand the baton to the rest of the team. Feels like the end of an era.
unwind 1y ago
Fantastic, what a run he had! Ton is obviously an epic leader who also happens to be a great guy! I had the absolute fortune to work in a bigger project in which the Blender Foundation was a partner back in the early 2000s, and got to meet him on many occasions. We rotated our project-wide meetings, and held one in Amsterdam when the Blender Conference was up, and I got absolutely hooked on both Amsterdam and the Blender community. I kept going to the Conference many times thereafter, even though I was never neither a developer or a user of Blender. It's just such a fantastic community, it was great to just hang out and soak up some happy vibes, and of course seeing and hearing Ton's voice (both literally and in the abstract as a leader) throughout it all. To this day our kitchen wall has a huge photo poster from Amsterdam front and center, and both kids have heard so many stories of what a great town that is. :)
solarkraft 1y ago
Blender is one of those shining FOSS successes we should all learn from. I loved watching the BlenderGuru interview: https://youtu.be/qJEWOTZnFeg https://youtu.be/qJEWOTZnFeg Thank you, Ton!
invader 1y ago
Ton is a legend and a personal hero of mine. He is a great innovator and an open-source superstar who disrupted the entire industry, traditionally dominated by big corporations. The entire Blender story is captivating - from modeler and raytracer prototypes on Amiga to the Internet bubble startup to the famous crowdfunding campaign to free Blender... It is a story that deserves a movie. For anyone interested in open-source history who is not familiar with the Blender story, I would highly recommend Ton's interview with Blender Guru, where he reflects on his journey - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJEWOTZnFeg&t=1523s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJEWOTZnFeg&t=1523s
ramses0 1y ago
The project history is also crucial to understand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)#History TLDR- it was an in-house editor through several bankrupted companies, and the code was purchased (assets) for $100k by the community and subsequently released and stewarded to where it is today. Truly an OSS and community home run!
xbar 1y ago
Thank you, Ton. The world will forever be a better place for your work.

379 points by cma 1y ago

https://www.blender.org/press/blender-foundation-announces-new-board-and-executive-director/ https://www.blender.org/press/blender-foundation-announces-n...

7373737373 1y ago

o7 I wish more businesses followed his footsteps in making their products free and open source and run by nonprofits

groby_b 1y ago
[flagged]
- sterwill 1y ago
  Not bragging, but I bought the Blender Book!
- 7373737373 1y ago
  Mr. Roosendaal himself sold me a Blender T-Shirt!

quxbar 1y ago

His work has enabled so much creativity and he gets to give great software away for free, what a chad.

heyheyhouhou 1y ago

He is such a great person and helped soo much fostering an amazing community. He will still be around and the people that will be leading Blender and its community are amazing also :)

chromakode 1y ago

Ton is a personal hero of mine. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a 3d animator because of Ton. I discovered Blender in the early 2000s as a kid. It was my first exposure to digital art tools because it was free. When Blender open sourced in 2002 it was a massive gift to kids around the world like me. (Ton was kind enough to reply to an email of mine at the time thanking him!) Ton and Blender have brought so much value to the world by making world-class creation tools available to everyone. Blender is one of the most successful open source projects of all time -- going from an underdog project notorious for difficult to use UI to a polished, ubiquitous, industry shaping tool. And never losing sight of the art; it still brings a huge smile to my face when Blender ships another Open Movie. Nearly ~25 years later, thank you again Ton.

DoctorOW 1y ago
> Ton is a personal hero of mine. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a 3d animator because of Ton. I discovered Blender in the early 2000s as a kid. I could've written this comment, I swear to god. I'll add that Blender is my favorite FOSS project.
- xipho 1y ago
  I've pitched Blender to NSF Review panels and the higher ups that come by those to visit as the way science should do software. Would love to know of others as successful as this, particularly as it crosses boundries to industry.
  - rgovostes 1y ago
    Can you elaborate on how Blender exemplifies “the way science should do software”? Are you talking specifically about some aspect like community governance, user experience, code quality, etc.?
- mstade 1y ago
  Ditto! I was introduced to blender in the late (great!) 90's and had a lot of fun with it for years before I largely gave up on working in 3d graphics and started building a career as a programmer instead. Sometimes I think of what could've been had I had the perseverance to stick with it, but mostly I'm just very grateful. Ton was a big part of that for sure, but a lot of others as well. WP (or waypay as I used to call him) who designed the Suzanne model (among a lot of other amazing artwork), Bart who was a pillar of the community and went on to found Blender Nation, and many more who really formed that community. Without it I doubt blender would be more than a footnote in the annals of history. Massive congratulations to Ton for achieving what many (including me!) never thought possible. Huge, huge kudos!
- ghurtado 1y ago
  > I'll add that Blender is my favorite FOSS project. It couldn't be any other way. Even when you ignore the fact that it is free, Blender is literally a better modeling platform than 90% of the commercial alternatives that charge in the hundreds to thousands of dollars for their products. My favorite thing about the project is the amazing turn about that they did with the UI about 10 years ago (or whenever that was, probably longer). They turned a complete disaster of an interface into a shining example to follow, and that's about when they won everyone's hearts and minds and basically took off in popularity. For a program that does basically everything, the entire thing is one consistent, intuitive, user experience from beginning to end. I can't think of any other FOSS projects with this level of polish, and very few commercial ones.

glimshe 1y ago

Blender is more valuable to humanity than all cryptocurrencies put together.

wiz21c 1y ago

He totally deserve some rest. Blender + the GPLization of Blender have been executed perfectly. We need more people like him.

MarsIronPI 1y ago
I wish more non-free software could be made free and open-source when its creators go defunct or lose interest in it. Another good example that brings a smile to my face is Duelyst[1]. The company behind it went under so they published the code and assets under CC0. 1: https://github.com/open-duelyst/duelyst https://github.com/open-duelyst/duelyst

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Vinnl 1y ago

Official announcement: https://www.blender.org/press/blender-foundation-announces-new-board-and-executive-director/ https://www.blender.org/press/blender-foundation-announces-n...

dang 1y ago
We'll put that link in the top text as well. Thanks!

unsignedint 1y ago

Having known him for decades—not in person, but through various email exchanges when I reached out to BF—I'd say it’s a bit more than “just recognizing the name.” I’ve followed his journey since well before the OSS crowdfunding days, and it’s honestly amazing to see everything he’s built. Thankfully, it sounds like he’s not stepping away completely, which is great news. As for the new leadership, Francesco Siddi comes from an animation background and is already managing Blender Studio. I’m genuinely glad to see the organization will continue to be led by people who deeply understand the tool and its community.

foxfired 1y ago

Blender went from being the least impressive 3d software when I first downloaded it in ~2003, to disrupting the industry. In the 2010s, you could still hear people would say in forums, "but no company uses blender in the industry". That's not the case anymore. The only limitation with blender now is your own creativity. I worked with several 3D artists, and they wouldn't have had their career without starting with that blender donut tutorial. A big thanks to Ton. And don't forget that you can support the blender foundation.

xtracto 1y ago
Blender did everything The GIMP should have done. A very specialized software with complex UI done in a way that people WITHIN the industry praise. I also remember downloading blender during my university years back in early 2004. Man was it crap compared to Maya or 3dMax. But nowadays it is incredible.
- II2II 1y ago
  > Blender did everything The GIMP should have done. Gimp is an amazing tool and its creators deserve our gratitude. Then there is Krita, which is another amazing tool and its creators deserve our gratitude. Then there is LibreOffice, ditto. Then there is KiCAD, ditto. Then there is ... I am not saying this to detract from Ton's contributions. I am saying this because a lot of people have made contributions to the open source world and, by extension, to the lives of many people. We shouldn't be treating this as a competition.
  - zdragnar 1y ago
    I didn't see the parent comment as downloading the gimp so much as praising something blender specifically did well. The fact that it has had more impact within the industry is the evidence to support it. Competitively, libre office has a fairly similar UI to the pre-ribbon office suite, which people at the time much preferred once the ribbon came around (before they got used to it anyway) but it hasn't had the same disruption that blender did. I suspect the file format compatibility issues and die-hard Excel fans have a lot to do with it, but it's an interesting counterpoint to the assertion that the UI is responsible for the difference in adoption rates.

fidotron 1y ago

Just another voice to say what a hero this guy is. I don't think many people appreciate just how this wasn't the easy home run it might look like with hindsight - there was quite a lot of outright Blender hate at one time, and certainly the games industry has an undercurrent of people quite bitter towards Ton personally, which I have tended to interpret most of the time as envy. In the last decade the enormous advances in the project lead to it being superficially unrecognizable, and it always reminds me more of Cubase than anything else. Scaling up development so that it got to the stage many more people could contribute was a serious achievement. My Blender 1.8 manual remains one of my most prized possessions from back when I ran that on a Linux partition and later a way out of date SGI Indigo. Good times. In any case, Ton, many thanks. A true inspiration. Edit to add: I wonder if anyone else around here was on elysiun? . . .

mstade 1y ago
I remember Elysiun! :o) Those were some good time. My handle back then was macke.
- fidotron 1y ago
  You know, I am sure I remember that handle! I was "kid tripod", in the UK back then. Now I'm reminiscing about Yafray . . .
Ylpertnodi 1y ago
> In the last decade the enormous advances in the project lead to it being superficially unrecognizable, and it always reminds me more of Cubase than anything else. As a very long-time Cubase user, how so?
- fidotron 1y ago
  The entire style and structure of the user interface; it has that look and feel of European audio software like Cubase or to a lesser degree Ableton. Obviously Blender used to be famously quite different from that and basically all other commercial 3D software too. I appreciate that it didn't simply attempt to turn into a Maya/3DS clone.

mempko 1y ago

Blender is my favorite free software project. I started using it in the late 90s and watched it become a powerhouse. Ton Roosendaal was clearly a great leader. Onward and upward!

lastdong 1y ago

A great example of what FOSS can achieve. Not only Blender is remarkable, but the amazing community truly reflects software for good, and we owe it all to Ton.

BoredPositron 1y ago

I remember getting some stickers at a tiny booth in 2011 at FMX. Ton was great to talk to, and I've had it installed ever since. I hope we'll see you again at FMX... I will stand in line for the free soft serve from cadnetwork and bring some over again :P Not only did the booth grow bigger every time they showed up, but the community did as well. Now we get talks and workshops, and we see Blender popping up in more and more breakdowns from the bigger VFX houses. It's been quite a journey, and I hope it continues. I doubled my yearly donation today. Godspeed.

dotnet00 1y ago

I think Blender has been one of the few pieces of software that has followed me since my early teens without me ever feeling like it went into a bad direction and managing to keep improving without changing its behavior just for the sake of change, such that I was always able to jump back in every few years without having to relearn everything.

shadowgovt 1y ago

What an absolute legend. He's earned his laurels but it's still the end of an era.

bhouston 1y ago

Ton did the most amazing job in his leadership role of Blender. Long term strategic and focused and leveraged the community to achieve the overall vision. Amazing.

bob1029 1y ago

I just got done playing around with some python automation in blender to create special parametric models for a Unity project. The tooling is unbelievably effective now. ChatGPT is also surprisingly good at writing custom blender tools and especially iterating existing ones.

boppo1 1y ago

This is big news. I hope Blender continues to thrive despite it.

pluto_modadic 1y ago

breath of fresh air compared to mullenweg or DHH.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

UncleEntity 1y ago

I think my favorite thing about Ton is he would putter around the Blender offices most of the year doing whatever he did to keep the ship running but would use his vacation time to implement some pretty far reaching changes like, the last one I remember, drag-and-drop then just be "here, have fun". He really didn't micro-manage the thing but just let The Community figure out where things needed to go, in the couple years I was involved in Blender I talked with him maybe twice on the IRC. I do wonder how much more complicated Blender has gotten over the years (to go a bit off topic) as before one could spend an afternoon tracing through the code and mostly figure out how something worked. Well, as long as you stayed away from the game engine and Video Sequence Editor as they were both kind of tacked on to serve a need and didn't get much love.

Smerity 1y ago

Ton Roosendaal is brilliant both strategically (taking a closed source codebase and growing it into the open source success story that is Blender today) but also as a person. When I was 15 or so, mid 2000s, I was heavily into the Blender community. Shortly after the closed source to open source transition I ran into a segfault. I could half heartedly sling code at the time but not enough to work out the issue I had. After noting the issue on IRC Ton personally helped tease out the bug. I _might_ have misdirected him by saying the bug occurred "with just a cube" (and he was like "Yay! Bugs are easier when they're simple cases!") but I neglected to note it was a cube subdivided half a dozen times, with a few thousand vertices ;) He had a vision and quiet persistent execution plan for Blender and the community that was far ahead of anything else in those (relatively) early days of OSS and the web. The Blender community was and is an amazing combination of technology, creativity, and positivity, and I think we owe Ton for helping steward much of it.

lyu07282 1y ago

Ton is an absolute legend, on par with Linus or Carmack in my book. They made a documentary series about Blender featuring a lot of Ton Roosendaal and his team. It is quite foreshadowing of his retirement in retrospect, highly recommended: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_dZtidLwo4&list=PLa1F2ddGya_8I8QCMCKlQUOQpgOga2nZ-&index=9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_dZtidLwo4&list=PLa1F2ddGya...

owenpalmer 1y ago

Ton has been a hero of mine ever since I started using Blender at the age of 9. That software was my childhood. I became very emotional watching him hand the baton to the rest of the team. Feels like the end of an era.

unwind 1y ago

Fantastic, what a run he had! Ton is obviously an epic leader who also happens to be a great guy! I had the absolute fortune to work in a bigger project in which the Blender Foundation was a partner back in the early 2000s, and got to meet him on many occasions. We rotated our project-wide meetings, and held one in Amsterdam when the Blender Conference was up, and I got absolutely hooked on both Amsterdam and the Blender community. I kept going to the Conference many times thereafter, even though I was never neither a developer or a user of Blender. It's just such a fantastic community, it was great to just hang out and soak up some happy vibes, and of course seeing and hearing Ton's voice (both literally and in the abstract as a leader) throughout it all. To this day our kitchen wall has a huge photo poster from Amsterdam front and center, and both kids have heard so many stories of what a great town that is. :)

solarkraft 1y ago

Blender is one of those shining FOSS successes we should all learn from. I loved watching the BlenderGuru interview: https://youtu.be/qJEWOTZnFeg https://youtu.be/qJEWOTZnFeg Thank you, Ton!

invader 1y ago

Ton is a legend and a personal hero of mine. He is a great innovator and an open-source superstar who disrupted the entire industry, traditionally dominated by big corporations. The entire Blender story is captivating - from modeler and raytracer prototypes on Amiga to the Internet bubble startup to the famous crowdfunding campaign to free Blender... It is a story that deserves a movie. For anyone interested in open-source history who is not familiar with the Blender story, I would highly recommend Ton's interview with Blender Guru, where he reflects on his journey - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJEWOTZnFeg&t=1523s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJEWOTZnFeg&t=1523s

ramses0 1y ago

The project history is also crucial to understand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)#History TLDR- it was an in-house editor through several bankrupted companies, and the code was purchased (assets) for $100k by the community and subsequently released and stewarded to where it is today. Truly an OSS and community home run!

xbar 1y ago

Thank you, Ton. The world will forever be a better place for your work.