"Money doesn't interest me" - Ton Roosendaal 2017 Interview

Ton is a legend and a personal hero of mine. He is a great innovator and an open-source superstar who disrupted the entire industry, traditionally dominated by big corporations. 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 - ▶ this video

I know John Riccitiello from when I worked at Maxis/EA on The Sims last century, and when he was involved with investing in Will Wright's Stupid Fun Club, and later when he was involved as CEO of EA in open sourcing SimCity for the One Laptop Per Child. We (including Eben Moglen, Free Software Foundation general counsel) explained to him why EA should open source the original SimCity source code under GPL-3, and what open source software and GPL-3 mean, and he approved the deal, and I gave him credit and positive feedback and sincerely thanked him. And we earned EA a lot of good publicity during a time when they were considered one of the worst companies in the world. EA Donates Original City-Building Game, SimCity, to ''One Laptop per Child'' Initiative: link OLCP EA Contract: link And I've given him credit for doing that here: link When Unity joined the Blender development fund as a Patron member while Riccitiello was CEO of Unity, I also gave him positive feedback and sincerely thanked him again, telling him how important Blender is to Unity game developers, and how important it is for them to work well together. Unity Joins the Blender Development Fund as a Patron Member: link I recommended he watch Ton Roosendaal's excellent "Money doesn't interest me" interview, in which he does not hold back on his feelings about Autodesk: ▶ this video And also this video of Ton getting hit by a ceiling tile during a talk. (Presumably perpetrated by Autodesk!) link Then when Joe Biden endorsed Unity three times in his inaugural address, I asked Riccitiello how much Unity paid for that product placement, but he wouldn't tell me: >"With Unity we can do great things, important things!" >"For without Unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury." >"And Unity is the path forward." >-Joe Biden's inaugural address. Then after Unity recently announced they're pulling the rug out from under their developers, I posted to Riccitiello's Facebook page a screen snapshot of the github star ranking table showing that Godot suddenly had a 535.6% increase in stars, and sincerely thanked him again, writing "Thank you for your substantial contribution to open source gaming engines, at the expense of your own company!" So I'm pretty sure he's aware of open source software, but I don't think he actually meant to benefit the Godot project so much at the expense of Unity. The Godot folks, who have greatly benefited from this fiasco through no fault of their own, immediately condemned the death threat that somebody (who turned out to be a Unity employee) posted, which caused Unity to cancel an event and close their office. link >Godot Engine @godotengine >We extend our sincere solidarity and support to the Unity workers. The recent reactions have left us profoundly disappointed. Threats of violence should have no place in the gamedev community. The truth behind the Unity "Death Threats": link >Update: San Francisco police told Polygon that officers responded to Unity’s San Francisco office “regarding a threats incident.” A “reporting party” told police that “an employee made a threat towards his employer using social media.” The employee that made the threat works in an office outside of California, according to the police statement. Reddit thread from 8 years ago, with recent posts: link TIL Unity CEO John Ricc

IIRC Ton Rosendaal, Blender's creator, still leads the project, but while listening very closely to its users and their pains and a very interesting approach to software development. The interview with BlenderGuru is great one: ▶ this video The last major redesign was started by a vision shared by the interviewer, who seems to be one of the many deeply invested artists. (This is all very much "IIRC", based on stuff I've peripherally heard or seen years ago)

Blender already has a solid and enthousiastic user base before the 2.7 UI update. Blender was also the forerunner in having a kickstarter-like scheme to raise enough money to make it opensource. There's an interesting interview between Ton Roosendaal and Blender Guru about the history. ▶ this video The Blender guys were also a lot less hostile towards people trying to make improvements to stuff like UX. One of the things that GIMP also desperately needs is a name change, while Blender is an odd choice it at least doesn't conjur up sexual images.