Blender Guru
7 HN recommenders · recommended in 12 months, 2018–2025
1:46:51 · 1.2M views · Feb 26, 2018
A long interview by Blender Guru with Ton Roosendaal, creator of Blender. They cover Blender's origins, the move to open source, why Ton is not driven by money, Autodesk, and what sets Blender apart from other open source projects.
Recommended as the best account of Blender's history and its user-focused approach as a free software success story.
13 comments from Hacker News
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 - this video
IIRC Ton Rosendaal, Blender's creator, still leads the project, but while listening very closely to its users and their pains and a very interesting approach to software development. The interview with BlenderGuru is great one: this video The last major redesign was started by a vision shared by the interviewer, who seems to be one of the many deeply invested artists. (This is all very much "IIRC", based on stuff I've peripherally heard or seen years ago)
The Blender story is quite an impressive one of iterative development. Ton Rosensaal very explicitly doesn't want technology for its own sake and wants to "get it out of the door", but does it all while keeping an eye on it being usable for creatives (now more than before, but the ground work was laid long ago, see everything being animatable) Great interview with Blender Guru: this video
Your last sentence reminded me of an interview with the Ton Rosendaal, the creator of Blender. He talks extensively about how Blender became OSS and not abandonware. I highly encourage to watch the whole interview (you need at least 5 mins to get used to his accent), but the important part starts around minute 14 this video
I reccomend watching this interview with him - at least the parts where he talks about money. It's incredibly refreshing to hear someone at the top of their game in the tech sphere say they're not interested in money except as a tool to help them create. this video