Ton Roosendaal is Blender's creator, and the co-founder of NeoGeo, the largest 3D animation house in the Netherlands in the nineties. Ton founded Not a Number (NaN) in 1998 to market and develop Blender. In March 2002, he started the non-profit Blender Foundation with the goal of resurrecting Blender as an open source software project. A deal was reached with the company's investors to initiate a fund-raising campaign to buy back the rights to Blender, at a cost of €100,000. Thanks to an enthusiastic group of volunteers including several ex-NaN employees, along with donations from thousands of loyal Blender supporters, the €100,000 target was reached in seven short weeks. Blender was then freely released to the world under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Since 2002, Ton is working full time employed by the Blender Foundation to coordinate Blender projects, ranging from software development to manual publishing. Ton was the producer of Elephants Dream, responsible for planning, overall coordination and “big picture” decisions. Ton was also the lead software developer for the project.
Keynote Address
Presentation: The Making of Elephants Dream
Members of the Orange Open Movie team discuss the making of the world’s first open movie, made entirely with open source graphics software such as Blender, and with all production files freely available to use under a Creative Commons license.
Blender Developers Meeting
Like the weekly IRC developers meeting, but now in real life! Discussing the current development projects, new plans, code refactors and roadmap issues.
Workshop: Debugging for Dummies
Debugging is an art, but really not very hard to learn. Actually half the debugging work can be done without programming skills even! In this session Ton will show a couple of past bug reports and show how to analyze the .blend sample files, and use gdb track this to the actual piece of code and fix it.
Blender Foundation and Closing Session
Going over what we've learned in the past three days, reminding people of actions we should initiate, and getting feedback and hints for next year's conference.