Ton Roosendaal

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.