1998, Ton decided to set up a derivative company of NeoGeo, and named it NaN, so as to further operate and develop Blender. NaN's core goal is to create and distribute a compact, cross-platform free 3D authoring suite. This idea is revolutionary when most commercial modeling software costs thousands of dollars. NaN hopes to bring professional 3D modeling and animation tools to ordinary people, and its business model includes providing commercial products and services around Blender. 1999 Nan participated in the Siggraph conference for the first time to promote it. Blender's first trip to Siggraph was very successful, which attracted great attention from the media and attendees and caused a sensation. Its great potential has been proved!
Taking advantage of this east wind, Nan received an investment of 4.5 million euros from venture capitalists in early 2000. This huge sum of money enabled the company to expand rapidly. Soon, 50 employees are working hard for the improvement and promotion of Blender all over the world. In the summer of 2000, Blender v2.0 was released. This version adds an integrated game engine to the 3D suite. By the end of 2000, there were more than 250,000 registered users of South Website.
Unfortunately, Nan's ambition and opportunities did not match the company's ability and market environment at that time. The rapid expansion led to the reorganization of a smaller company through new investors in August 20001year. Half a year later, Nan released the first commercial software, Blender Publisher. This product is aimed at the emerging network interactive 3D media market at that time. Due to the poor sales performance and the difficult economic environment at that time, the new investors decided to close all the businesses in Nan, including stopping the development of Blender. Although Blender had obvious shortcomings at that time, such as complex internal structure, incomplete function realization and nonstandard interface, the enthusiastic support of user groups and consumers who had purchased Blender Publisher kept Ton from leaving Blender. Since it is no longer feasible to form another company, Ton established the Blender Foundation, a non-profit organization, in March 2002.
The main goal of Blender Foundation is to find a way for Blender to continue its development and promotion as a community-based open source project. In July 2002, Ton successfully got NaN's investors to agree to Blender Foundation's unique plan to try to make Blender open source. This "Liberating Blender" campaign tries to raise 654.38 million euros, so that the Foundation can buy the source code and intellectual property of Blender from NaN's investors and then hand it over to the open source community. A group of volunteers, including several former Yugoslav employees, enthusiastically launched a fund-raising activity for "Jiefang Mixer". Surprisingly, the goal of 654.38 million euros was achieved in just seven weeks. On the Sunday of June 65438+1October 65438+March, 2002, Blender was released to the world under the GNU General License (GPL). The development of Blender has continued to this day, and diligent volunteer teams from all over the world, led by founder Ton, have been pushing this work continuously since then.