Ton Roosendaal to Step Down as Blender Chairman and CEO
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Ton Roosendaal is stepping down as Blender's chairman and CEO, marking the end of an era for the popular open-source 3D creation software, with the community expressing gratitude and admiration for his leadership and vision.
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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.
I could've written this comment, I swear to god. 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.
It's way more impressive to turn a project around, than have it good at the quality in question the whole time.
Path dependency? Not today, daemon!
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!
Ton for President of the World! =)
1: https://github.com/open-duelyst/duelyst
A big thanks to Ton. And don't forget that you can support the blender foundation.
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.
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.
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.
When the Ribbon UI came around in office, it faced a ton of push back due to moving so many things around and hiding so many common operations, but the file format translation issues between office and alternatives kept people in the MS cage, I think.
Nowadays many users grew up with the ribbon, so it doesn't seem so painful.
I grew up pre-ribbon. I did not like the ribbon. MS Office 97 still had a way better UI than anything open/libre office did.
If i had to rank, i would say
Old pre-ribbon ms office > ms office with ribbon > [a large gap] open/libre office.
The Blender team did not always accept code or suggestions. This has been a running theme with several people I've known that felt their work and/or ideas were rejected by people that didn't grasp their brilliance. There was a possibly unusual willingness to say no, but it was more discerning than with GIMP which gave off the appearance of vetoing virtually everything. (At one time all GIMP woes would be solved by CinePaint aka "Film Gimp").
But it was combined with the idea of the studio, in order to find out where exactly the pain points are to be addressed. In a sense this is agile software done right, where you get the users and devs alongside each other with a common goal. Unsurprisingly one result is the UI today is not mocked in the way it was 20 years ago, while the GIMP UI has remained a constant point of confusion.
I'm not sure Blender development is "agile" in the traditional sense of the term because from the outside there are signs that it is slow paced with high inertia (specialists in charge of large features, planning over many months, purpose-specific contractors and GSoC projects, features that are delayed until they are ready), but they are certainly successful at delivering copious, high quality and high value features. Let's hope that the good leadership continues.
If only...
Krita is awesome too and does interfaces right as well. Bought it on Steam. But I still use Gimp since the use cases are different. But it might perhaps be worthwhile to put your open source project on Steam anyway to make some bucks. I would happily buy more.
Blender did make huge jumps in recent years. Suddly you couldn't even update as fast as they introduced new things. It is amazing by now but I would argue that its functionality was unfairly derided in the past while it was already quite capable for quite some time.
Gimp for a looooong time was a multi-window user interface, completely antithetical to almost any other application released in the last 20 years or so.
Same as Mac software in the late 90s. GIMP is/allows MDI, tabs or whatever it is called. A decade old at least, Wikipedia is not clear if the change was "new feature" or "new default but avaliable before". Maybe Mac native software went that way too, no idea what is the trend there now. Most things reinvent everything including window management, poorly, inside a browser, anyway.
I use GIMP almost exclusively in my job. I have photoshop, but I know GIMP and I'm better with it. I make presentation pieces and fix images, do image data rescue and make fun pieces with it on the side, like posters for my bands and accidental art made by playing with sliders in the FX.
Its very versatile and capable, but it is almost entirely unlike photoshop, and since I grew up with it I vastly prefer GIMP over photoshop.
I disagree. I use Affinity Photo 2, which also has a different interface, and it's so much easier to use than GIMP despite having more features.
A big problem for a chunk of possible users was that GIMP's colour support sucked (and I believe it's still not really fixed). The moment you wanted to work outside RGBA at 8bits per channel, and maybe a bit playing with indexed color, you were in for a lesson in pain. And a lot of people wanted a tool they could earn money with, and that meant for a long time at least some amount of print work. And print, even digital printing, means CMYK. Later on photography started demanding HDR features. Even web these days will deal with non-RGB color spaces, and I am not talking about HDR.
Meanwhile GIMP's engine for years even if in UI you technically could select colours in CMYK, they were internally converted to RGB for calculations, then converted again. CinePaint, aka FilmGimp, started because people could not get patches for 48bit RGBA into mainline. And so on, and so on. Meanwhile Photoshop and other competitors would not only have a less divisive UI, but also additional features (I knew people who would choose Photoshop just for included pantone colour database).
I'm not punching at all.
Like, you can claim the weird name is a celebration of how anti-corporate and unfettered the team is, but whenever I try tell people about it for the first time, it’s super distracting and adds a lot of unnecessary friction. It always goes like this:
“Photoshop licenses are so expensive, I wish there was something cheaper since many of our team members don’t need all the features.”
“Have you tried GIMP? Now hold on, I know the—“
“I’m sorry, tried what?!”
“It’s got a weird name, but a lot of people find it a really good replacement for—“
“Wait, is it named after that BDSM guy from Pulp Fiction?”
“Well it’s an acronym… (sigh) but also, yes. But it’s really solid software people have been—“
“Why on Earth would you name a product after that guy?”
I think tools like git get past this issue by being so aggressively useful and now ubiquitous, but in the early stages of a project if you don’t have the massive adoption git had (which led to a positive feedback loop of more feature development leading to more users) then you can end up dragging your name like an albatross around your neck.
In general I think naming is a vastly overblown issue. If bike shedders had their way, we would never have names as nondescript as Apple or Amazon, or as obscure as Google, yet they are wildly, unreasonably successful.
Gimp’s adoption problem lies elsewhere.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Blender
Nowadays in America, if someone over the age of 30 (and many people under the age of 30) hear the word “gimp” or more specifically “the gimp”, their mind immediately flashes back to this scene from the incredibly popular movie Pulp Fiction (this clip is not safe for work and depicts sexual assault) https://youtu.be/PcZUjEWFpKs
If you check the first paragraph of the History section of GIMP’s Wikipedia page, you can see that this is not a coincidence, the creators did in fact name it after the character from that clip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP
So no, I don’t think this is an issue of “any interesting name being too controversial”. There are many places you could draw the line before getting to “let’s name our software after the Gimp from Pulp Fiction”.
A few years later, someone said I should try it again. It's finally good. And they were right. My whole team uses Blender now and we're very satisfied with it.
I've heard the same thing with GIMP: "Try it again. It's good now." Unfortunately, this isn't true and likely will never be.
Still kinda stupid easy to accidentally have non-destructive edit filters making your entire computer fall over because you have these filters that are slow to apply... but the UI works out quite well now
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? . . .
Those were some good time. My handle back then was macke.
Now I'm reminiscing about Yafray . . .
As a very long-time Cubase user, how so?
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.
I used to enjoy doing the speed modelling challenges :)
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_dZtidLwo4&list=PLa1F2ddGya...
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. :)
Thank you, Ton!
I wish more businesses followed his footsteps in making their products free and open source and run by nonprofits
He's earned his laurels but it's still the end of an era.
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!
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
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.
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