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01. BLENDER

Describe what the project is. Does it have a mission statement?

“Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation.”

Describe the history of the project -- when / how did it start? Has it grown?

  • Started off as in-house software for Ton Roosendaal’s animation studio NeoGeo
  • Continued development after 1998 under company called Not a Number
  • In 2000 the investors of NaN decided to shutdown all operations, including development of Blender.
  • An active user community did not want blender to shut down, and pushed Ton to find a way to keep the project alive
  • In 2002 Ton founded Blender Foundation (non-profit), the goal of which was to find a way to keep development of Blender alive as an open source project.
  • In July 2002 Ton convinced the investors to agree to a “Free Blender” plan - a one time EUR100K fee to open source the blender project.
  • By October the campaign had succeeded, nd blender was released under the GNU General Public License, meaning blender will be free to use and distribute, forever

Who are the contributors to the project?

  • Ton Roosendaal, who manages the foundation and has the final say on Blender development.
    • Ton is the Benevolent Dictator For Life. The idea here is that the entire project is managed by one person, who delegates to others but retains all veto rights of what goes on throughout development.
  • Blender gives grants to individual developers / groups to work on different aspects of the program.
  • Individuals can also contribute voluntarily; there are a lot of resources available to help contributors (developers, designers, translators) get started.

Describe the project's funding. Is it funded? What kinds of support does it get?

  • Individual donations through the Blender Foundation website
  • The website also lists their main sponsors / donors
    • AMD, BlenderMarket, Cambridge Medical Robotics, Private Internet Access, Tangent Animation, Valve Corporation (Steam Workshop)

Describe the project's community. Are there separate developer / user communities?

  • There is a distinction between the developer and user communities.
  • The Blender website lists independent user communities in various languages.
  • The Blender developer community has become pretty cohesive, under the direction of the Blender Foundation and Ton Roosendaal
    • The licence of Blender restricts any derivation of it being sold, which in our opinion incentivises people to contribute to the core rather than branching out with their own versions.
    • The distinctive characteristic about the Blender developer community is that the collaboration / participation happens via diffusion within the developer website.

Where are the primary places they interact?

  • The source code and git repositories are hosted on the blender site, using a service called Diffusion. This is sort of like a version on GitHub, in that it tracks issues, allows comments, and has a User Interface more friendly than pure git (although more complicated than GitHub).
  • The Blender site contains a number of community options, including a development blog, a developer portal (the GitHub-like community around Blender), and a development wiki
  • For more open discussions within the community there is a developers’ forum, a mailing list and regular developer meetings every Monday via IRC. More information about communication channels here
  • There is also a development Roadmap with which the leaders of the Blender project lay out the future plans and goals.

Does the project have a Code of Conduct? What does it consist of? If it does not, why?

  • The closest we can find to a Code of Conduct is the Advice page on the development wiki, which lists a few best practices and resources for new developers.
  • Each communication channel (mailing list, IRC, the forum) has its own guidelines for interaction.
  • A general guideline to address the growing success of Blender in a legal context has been written up here
  • In terms of contributing code, the guidelines are listed on the wiki

Does the project have a license? Why was the license chosen?

  • The software as a whole is released under GNU General Public License (GPL)
    • When Ton Roosendaal was buying back the software from the initial investors, the investors agreed to release the software under GPL licence in order to prevent other entities from profiting from Blender
    • Blender states their commitment to maintaining the software free on their website.
  • Some modules of the source code, such as the Blender Cycles rendering engine, is released under Apache 2.0

Evaluate the project's approach to equity, diversity, and inclusion in its community.

  • We can’t seem to find a centralised information source for inclusion and diversity policies. While the general atmosphere of blender seems to be along the lines of inclusion and free access to software, it may help their cause to make their specific policies more clear and up front
  • One of the main contribution documents listed on the blender development page is for translators, so it is clear that Blender is at least committed to including the international community as users and developers. Is the project still active? Why or why not? The development of Blender is still active. There is a very active user community, which we think is the primary motivation / reason why there is an active ongoing development.

What is the future of the project?

  • The next big milestone for Blender is the release of a totally overhauled version 2.8. This includes a stunning real-time render engine to compete with large 3D companies such as Unity, Unreal, Maya, and 3DS Max
  • Ton Roosendaal will continue to lead Blender as a Benevolent Dictator For Life.
  • Future development plans, ToDos, and possibilities can be found on the Roadmaps & Projects page.

Google Doc

View documentation of the case study on Google Doc. Use you NYU email to access.

Slides

Link to slides we used to present.