Blender is celebrating its 25th birthday, today on 02 January 2019! It is quite an achievement. Blender is a free tool and a open source project.
The Blender creator is Ton Roosendaal. He created Blender in 1994 for the Dutch company NeoGeo.
Later the company will be dissolved, but Ton will continue with Blender development. In 2002 he started the Free Blender campaign to open source Blender for a one-time payment of 100,000€, collected from the community. The campaign was successful and on August 20, 2003, the first free version of Blender was released.
That was Blender 2.26. The main version of Blender that followed are outlined below, as well as their release dates.
| Version | Date |
|---|---|
| Blender 2.3 | November 22, 2003 |
| Blender 2.4 | December 22, 2005 |
| Blender 2.5 | June 13, 2009 |
| Blender 2.6 | October 19, 2011 |
| Blender 2.7 | March 19, 2014 |
Blender has been shaping the 3d graphics industry for years. This is quite a legacy. And all this time it is an open source, free to use software.
It is a feature reach software as well.
There are so many things that this open source software can do, that usually people are using just a bit of it. Everybody finds his niche within and stick to it. Amazing.
Blender 2.80
These days we have Blender 2.80 Beta. It is not officially released yet, but the community is already using it in a big way. It is full with new features, like EEVEE and grease pencil. It has a new user interface as well.
Congrats on the people working on this project.
It is a real life example of open source project, that has been around for years. Something that the crypto economy is just starting to discover and develop.
This is a retrospective from the creator Ton Roosendaal.
