The Blender Foundation acts as an independent public benefit corporation, to facilitate the open source Blender projects. Individuals or companies interested to support this financially can contact the foundation or visit the donations page.
We also run an e-shop where documentation and Blender goodies are sold. All revenues from the shop are used to cover Foundation projects.
We currently maintain three sites:
A small group of system administrators, designers and moderators maintain the sites.
You can join or contact the team for www.blender.org here. You can find a manual for using Typo3 CMS there as well.
Blender is being made by 100s of active volunteers from all around the world; by studios and individual artists, professionals and hobbyists, scientists and students, vfx experts and animators, and so on.
All of them are united by an interest to have access to a fully free/open source 3D creation pipeline. Blender Foundation supports and facilitates these goals - even employs a small staff for that - but fully depends on the online community to achieve this goal.
More help is always welcome!
There are a number of different things you can do to get involved, from directly working on the Blender source code, to writing documentation and various other tasks.
We host our own 'SourceForge' style projects space, at projects.blender.org. Here the official Blender Foundation release is hosted (bf-blender), but there's room for other Blender or 3D related projects as well. We're open for developers to create experimental Blender trees or even complete forks. Just make an account at the projects site, a link for proposing projects can then be found at 'My Page'.
The Blender source code is licensed under the GNU General Public License and is available through blender.org SVN checkout or online via the web interface.
Useful reading and things to do for (new) developers:
The BlenderDev pages on the blender wiki offer free space for anyone to contribute proposals or document ongoing projects.
Contacting developers
Read Bugreports about how to handle verifying and reporting bugs.
If you want to contribute a piece of code, you can send us a "patch", which is typically a text file generated with a "svn diff" command. Writing a clear description what the patch is intended to do is important.
Provide patches in the patch tracker, but email the developers mailing list to notify them.
Full instructions on making and submitting patches can be found on the Using Patches age.
Also Python scripts you'd like to see included in our releases you can post in the Patch tracker. You can also contact the maintainer of the Python Resources page to have it linked.
The Blender Foundation considers education and training projects crucial for a succesful Open Source project. We are currently coordinating knowledge on this area, sharing experiences, and evaluating proposals for official (certified) training programs on the bf-education mailing list. Everyone interested in the topic is free to join.
A group of active Blender users have established a Documentation Board, to organize and write full and freely available end-user documentation.
Volunteers interested in documentation translations can contact the DocBoard as well.
As a Blender user panel, to give feedback on development and come with proposals for new Blender features, we've organized the Functionality board.
Information on Blender in general, downloads and documentation, can be found on the www.blender.org site.