What's the deal?

The owner of Blender, NaN Holding BV, has decided on a definite new future for Blender. The independent non-profit organisation Blender Foundation will obtain a license to continue Blender development by publishing and maintaining the sources and make it 'free software' or 'open source' forever.

What the NaN Holding shareholders and the Foundation agree on:

• publishing the full Blender sources, including old and new development, under the GNU GPL license ('Free Software'). The NaN mobile technology will not be included in this.
• the Foundation has to pay in advance a one time fee of 100k euro for this (100k USD). After payment, the sources will be opened.
• the Foundation will organize a funding campaign, and can exploit the old Blender website and re-establish e-shop services for this.
• the Foundation can offer an additional commercial non-copylefted (BSD style) license for companies to integrate with non-GPL projects.

NaN Holding recognizes that, giving all circumstances and the current economic situation, moving on with Blender to this next stage will be the most beneficial thing to do, to protect past investments, but also to respect everything that has been realized until now by the NaN companies and the world-wide user community.

The Blender Foundation has started a world wide funding campaign, to both finance the one-time license fee as to cover general services and exploitation. After launching the sources, the Foundation will establish user services, for both artists and coders. Access to sources and web services will be free then.

Amsterdam, july 2002

info@blender3d.com