Ton Roosendaal to step down as Blender chairman and CEO

Ton is a personal hero of mine. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a 3d animator because of Ton. I discovered Blender in the early 2000s as a kid. It was my first exposure to digital art tools because it was free. When Blender open sourced in 2002 it was a massive gift to kids around the world like me. (Ton was kind enough to reply to an email of mine at the time thanking him!)

Ton and Blender have brought so much value to the world by making world-class creation tools available to everyone. Blender is one of the most successful open source projects of all time -- going from an underdog project notorious for difficult to use UI to a polished, ubiquitous, industry shaping tool. And never losing sight of the art; it still brings a huge smile to my face when Blender ships another Open Movie. Nearly ~25 years later, thank you again Ton.

Blender went from being the least impressive 3d software when I first downloaded it in ~2003, to disrupting the industry. In the 2010s, you could still hear people would say in forums, "but no company uses blender in the industry". That's not the case anymore. The only limitation with blender now is your own creativity. I worked with several 3D artists, and they wouldn't have had their career without starting with that blender donut tutorial.

A big thanks to Ton. And don't forget that you can support the blender foundation.

Ton Roosendaal is brilliant both strategically (taking a closed source codebase and growing it into the open source success story that is Blender today) but also as a person.

When I was 15 or so, mid 2000s, I was heavily into the Blender community. Shortly after the closed source to open source transition I ran into a segfault. I could half heartedly sling code at the time but not enough to work out the issue I had.

After noting the issue on IRC Ton personally helped tease out the bug. I _might_ have misdirected him by saying the bug occurred "with just a cube" (and he was like "Yay! Bugs are easier when they're simple cases!") but I neglected to note it was a cube subdivided half a dozen times, with a few thousand vertices ;)

He had a vision and quiet persistent execution plan for Blender and the community that was far ahead of anything else in those (relatively) early days of OSS and the web.

The Blender community was and is an amazing combination of technology, creativity, and positivity, and I think we owe Ton for helping steward much of it.

He totally deserve some rest. Blender + the GPLization of Blender have been executed perfectly. We need more people like him.

Having known him for decades—not in person, but through various email exchanges when I reached out to BF—I'd say it’s a bit more than “just recognizing the name.” I’ve followed his journey since well before the OSS crowdfunding days, and it’s honestly amazing to see everything he’s built. Thankfully, it sounds like he’s not stepping away completely, which is great news.

As for the new leadership, Francesco Siddi comes from an animation background and is already managing Blender Studio. I’m genuinely glad to see the organization will continue to be led by people who deeply understand the tool and its community.

I think Blender has been one of the few pieces of software that has followed me since my early teens without me ever feeling like it went into a bad direction and managing to keep improving without changing its behavior just for the sake of change, such that I was always able to jump back in every few years without having to relearn everything.

Ton did the most amazing job in his leadership role of Blender. Long term strategic and focused and leveraged the community to achieve the overall vision. Amazing.

He is such a great person and helped soo much fostering an amazing community. He will still be around and the people that will be leading Blender and its community are amazing also :)

Just another voice to say what a hero this guy is. I don't think many people appreciate just how this wasn't the easy home run it might look like with hindsight - there was quite a lot of outright Blender hate at one time, and certainly the games industry has an undercurrent of people quite bitter towards Ton personally, which I have tended to interpret most of the time as envy.

In the last decade the enormous advances in the project lead to it being superficially unrecognizable, and it always reminds me more of Cubase than anything else. Scaling up development so that it got to the stage many more people could contribute was a serious achievement.

My Blender 1.8 manual remains one of my most prized possessions from back when I ran that on a Linux partition and later a way out of date SGI Indigo. Good times.

In any case, Ton, many thanks. A true inspiration.

Edit to add: I wonder if anyone else around here was on elysiun? . . .

I just got done playing around with some python automation in blender to create special parametric models for a Unity project. The tooling is unbelievably effective now. ChatGPT is also surprisingly good at writing custom blender tools and especially iterating existing ones.

A great example of what FOSS can achieve. Not only Blender is remarkable, but the amazing community truly reflects software for good, and we owe it all to Ton.

His work has enabled so much creativity and he gets to give great software away for free, what a chad.

I wish more businesses followed his footsteps in making their products free and open source and run by nonprofits

This is big news. I hope Blender continues to thrive despite it.

I think my favorite thing about Ton is he would putter around the Blender offices most of the year doing whatever he did to keep the ship running but would use his vacation time to implement some pretty far reaching changes like, the last one I remember, drag-and-drop then just be "here, have fun". He really didn't micro-manage the thing but just let The Community figure out where things needed to go, in the couple years I was involved in Blender I talked with him maybe twice on the IRC.

I do wonder how much more complicated Blender has gotten over the years (to go a bit off topic) as before one could spend an afternoon tracing through the code and mostly figure out how something worked. Well, as long as you stayed away from the game engine and Video Sequence Editor as they were both kind of tacked on to serve a need and didn't get much love.

Blender is my favorite free software project. I started using it in the late 90s and watched it become a powerhouse. Ton Roosendaal was clearly a great leader. Onward and upward!

Blender is more valuable to humanity than all cryptocurrencies put together.

What an absolute legend.

He's earned his laurels but it's still the end of an era.

I remember getting some stickers at a tiny booth in 2011 at FMX. Ton was great to talk to, and I've had it installed ever since. I hope we'll see you again at FMX... I will stand in line for the free soft serve from cadnetwork and bring some over again :P Not only did the booth grow bigger every time they showed up, but the community did as well. Now we get talks and workshops, and we see Blender popping up in more and more breakdowns from the bigger VFX houses. It's been quite a journey, and I hope it continues. I doubled my yearly donation today. Godspeed.

breath of fresh air compared to mullenweg or DHH.

We'll put that link in the top text as well. Thanks!