Ton Roosendaal

Ton Roosendaal
Ton Roosendaal, 2008
Born	20 March 1960 (1960-03-20)
Occupation	chairman, Blender Foundation
Known for	Blender, Elephants Dream, Big Buck Bunny, Yo Frankie!, Sintel

Ton Roosendaal (Dutch pronunciation: [tɔn roːsɛnˈdaːl]; born 20 March 1960) is a Dutch software developer. He is known as the original creator of the open-source 3D creation suite Blender, as chairman of the Blender Foundation, and for pioneering large scale open-content projects. In 2007 he established the Blender Institute in Amsterdam, where he works on coordinating Blender development, publishing manuals and DVD training, and organizing 3D animation and game projects.

Early years

In 1998, Roosendaal founded a company called Not a Number (NaN), in order to further market and develop Blender. NaN's business model involved providing commercial products and services around Blender. In 2000 the company secured growth financing by several investment companies. Target was to create a free creation tool for interactive 3D (on-line) content, and commercial versions of the software for distribution and publishing.

Due to low sales and the ongoing difficult economic climate, the NaN investors decided to shut down all operations in early 2002. This meant that the development of Blender was discontinued. In May 2002, with support from the user community and customers, Ton Roosendaal started the non-profit Blender Foundation.

Blender Foundation

The Blender Foundation's first goal was to find a way to continue developing and promoting Blender as a community based open source project. In July 2002, NaN investors agreed on a plan from the Blender Foundation to attempt to open source Blender. The "Free Blender" campaign sought to raise 100,000 EUR as a one-time fee so that the NaN investors would agree on open sourcing Blender. To everyone's shock and surprise the campaign reached the 100,000 EUR goal in only seven weeks. On Sunday 13 October 2002, Blender was released to the world under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Blender development has continued to the present day, driven by a team of dedicated volunteers from around the world, coordinated by Ton Roosendaal.

With Blender originating as an in-house creation tool, feedback from the use of the tool has fed into its ongoing development. In the first two and a half years of open source development, it was especially this unique attribute of the Blender project that has proved to be difficult to organize and maintain. Instead of funding the project directly by bringing together software developers, the Blender Foundation decided to start a project to bring together the most outstanding artists in the Blender community and challenge them to make a 3D animation movie short, as this would in turn both prove that Blender can be used to make a professional quality animation, and help the development of the project.

On 16 July 2009, Roosendaal was awarded an honorary doctorate in Technology at the Leeds Metropolitan University for his work on Blender.

Open-content projects

In 2005 work on Project Orange began. It became the world's first widely recognized open movie Elephants Dream. - Review1 2 3 The end-result and all of the assets as used in the studio were published under an open license, Creative Commons Attribution.

Because of the overwhelming success of the first open movie project, Ton Roosendaal, established the "Blender Institute" in summer 2007. This now is the permanent office and studio to more efficiently organize the Blender Foundation goals, but especially to coordinate and facilitate Open Projects related to 3D movies, games or visual effects.

In April 2008 the Peach Project, the open movie Big Buck Bunny, was completed in the Blender Institute. In September 2008 the open game Yo Frankie! was released. The third open movie, Project Durian, also known as Sintel was released on 30 September 2010. Currently, he is working towards a fourth project, known as Project Mango, and has already announced a Project Gooseberry to follow it in 2012–2014, both announced on Twitter on 10 January 2011.

External links

• Blender.org
• Interview on BlenderGuru.com
• Interview on Creative Commons
• Interview CGenie
• Interview Winter Camp