Ton Roosendaal

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Ton Roosendaal 2008

Ton Roosendaal (born March 20, 1960 in the Netherlands ) is a Dutch software developer, chairman of the Blender Foundation and chief developer of the free 3D modeling program Blender . He is also the producer of Elephants Dream , Big Buck Bunny , Sintel , Tears of Steel and Cosmos Laundromat: First Cycle , four computer-generated short films that were mainly created with free software.

In the 1980s he worked as a freelance designer in the field of industrial design. Even then he was very interested in technology and bought his first Amiga in 1985 , for which the first graphics, video and 3D graphics software were available. In 1988 he co-founded a company called NeoGeo, which offered video graphics, video animation and effects with a focus on animation . For this purpose, separate software for internal use was developed for cost reasons.

Ton Roosendaal in the Blender 3D portrait

Blender was born in 1995; it was the third generation of the internal tools and ran exclusively on silicon graphics systems .

In 1998 Roosendaal decided to market Blender and founded NaN (Not a Number Technologies). In the same year a version for Linux was ported for the first time and also offered as freeware . Blender quickly became popular. In 2002 NaN went bankrupt like many other dotcoms ( dotcom bubble ). Roosendaal organized a meeting with all investors and was able to get them to publish the source code under the GNU General Public License (GPL). However, the investors set two conditions: firstly, it should not be possible for another company to pick up the source code and market its own commercial program from it, and secondly, a sum of 100,000 euros should be paid. The first point has been sufficiently met by the GPL. The amount of money was to be reached in the form of donations, so on July 18, 2002, he founded the Blender Foundation. Within just seven weeks, the required amount was reached on September 7th. This fundraising strategy is also known as the “ Street Performer Protocol ” or later “ Crowdfunding ”.

In May 2005 Roosendaal announced the Orange project, from which the film Elephants Dream emerged on March 24, 2006 . He was a producer on this project as well as on the subsequent Peach Project . The Blender Foundation's film project, Durian , was also produced by Ton Roosendaal. The film premiered on September 27, 2010 at the Netherlands Film Festival .

In July 2009 Roosendaal received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Business and Law at Leeds Metropolitan University in Leeds, England.

Web links

Commons : Ton Roosendaal  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ blendernation.com. Retrieved May 22, 2011 .
  2. ^ The Team >> Cosmos Laundromat - The Gooseberry Open Movie Project. In: gooseberry.blender.org. Retrieved March 30, 2016 .
  3. ^ Ton Roosendaal: Sintel official premiere. August 16, 2010, accessed September 28, 2010 .
  4. ↑ Hans-Joachim Baader: Ton Roosendaal receives an honorary doctorate. Retrieved May 22, 2011 .
personal data
SURNAME Roosendaal, clay
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch software developer and chairman of the Blender Foundation
DATE OF BIRTH March 20, 1960
PLACE OF BIRTH Netherlands