By: Ton Roosendaal
Blender is proudly independent and designed to run cross platform with features equally supported for all users!
Recently the organization of the Libre Graphics Conference was contacted by someone from Microsoft developer support, he would like to attend the conference and collect information about how free and open CG software could be supported better.
I emailed him with a request to provide our volunteers with free MSVC Pro licenses, and to at least make sure OpenGL keeps being well supported on the Windows platform. He then replied that he would look into the free licenses topic, but especially was curious about what kind of MS file format support we would like to have to improve our user experience on Windows.
Since I'm not much familiar with the Windows platform, I forwarded his questions to the internal developer mailing list. This has resulted in a couple of replies and suggestions, which I can send back to him.
In the mean time Groklaw discovered this mail and concluded there was apparently big news here; and that's when the news got spread... resulting in long threaded debates and sometimes the wildest speculations, as if Blender was being assimilated or potentially destroyed by Microsoft!
For those who know Blender well, and certainly our developers, it's a fact that we've been keeping the program running very nicely cross platform, providing users on every platform an identical experience and feature set. We don't depend on platform specific libraries, nor will we ever accept limitations on using Blender imposed by any operating system. This independency in software development is a core Blender value, which makes the program so cool, and sometimes a bit weird yes. :)
Probably everyone agrees that Microsoft and the free and open source movement have issues - to say it very nicely - but it doesn't mean that we won't reply to them in a friendly fashion, or provide information or support. They can get involved or sponsor Blender developers under the same condition as any other company.
Ton Roosendaal
Chairman Blender Foundation
www.blendernation.com/2008/05/13/microsoft-emails-blender-about-file-format-support/