NaN Closes Shop, The End of Blender?

lowell writes "The shareholders and directors of NaN Holding BV, owners of Blender, have decided to terminate all activities of NaN Technologies BV and apply for its bankruptcy at the Amsterdam court. It means that effective today, all technology development and website activities around Blender will be frozen. " Nice app. Too bad really.

Comments

Please release the source under GPL

[BroadbandBradley]

because you kow if you do, blender will live on no matter what.

Then you can let users develop the app and stick to making money writing Blender Books.

I like Blender, anyone got any suggestions for alternatives for 3D animation on Linux?

Re:Please release the source under GPL

[FortKnox]

From the article:
But is there a future for Blender anyways?
Internally, and on the public discussion forums, a lot of time has been spent on that topic. There are a lot of believers and non-believers for every topic and scenario. But in general there's a unified feeling among everyone - users, employees and shareholders - that Blender still has a warm living heart, still alive, and worth being continued.
We will come back to everyone with news on the shortest possible term. Thank you all for your understanding,

Sounds like its a heavy possiblity of being opened up.

Good news for animators, bad news for those that paid for licenses.

Re:Please release the source under GPL

[4of12]

will be encouranged to liquidate their assets, like Blender, to another company who will pay for the technology. So getting it open-sourced is probably not an option on the table.

So, following up with a previous poster that commented that, despite having paid a license earlier, he would be willing to pay to have it open sourced under the GPL

Why don't Blender enthusiasts contribute to a fund with the express purpose of buying the Blender License so as to GPL the code?

If you get more money than you need in the bid at the auction, then consider using the extra to pay for some dedicated time by the author, etc.

Re:Please release the source under GPL

[malducin]

From what I remember from an article XSI (probably starting with v. 2) is actually developed under Linux and from there ported to NT and Irix.

There are also other apps. Most people forget about Houdini from Side Effects. There was of course Shake, but now that Apple bought Nothing Real who knows what is going to happen. Photorealistic RenderMan also has run under Linux for quite a while.

ask ILM or Henson Associates

[brokeninside]

Of course, I have no idea why they ported XSI to Linux anyway. How many Linux users can afford an $8000 piece of software (for the light version, no less)?

Because powerhouse graphic workshops like ILM and Henson Associates like Linux. And they can afford $8,000 pieces of software. Of course just because it's built doesn't mean they will come. Henson's Creature Shop is rumored to be quite fond of Maya on Linux.

Regards,

Lee Irenæus Malatesta

Can't say I am surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to see it go... It was really a pretty decent app. But I never saw what NaN's business model was.

At $300 Blender was in the same market as programs like Amapi, Carrara, ZBrush, and maybe Rhino. With Blender's canyon-wall like learning curve and lack of features, how did they possibly think they were going to compete?

It was just recently that the program offered a decent set of booleans. Their answer to file export was DXF and VRML 1.0. They were relying on the community to develop import and export options for more common file formats like OBJ and 3DS, and the ability to develop those scripts wasn't available in versions of the application above 2.04. (They were adding them back to 2.25, but that was only available to license holders).

Blender had some good features. Its UV mapper was one of its highpoints in my opinion. But the only factor Blender really had going for it was that it was available for Linux. While that one advantage may have served it well in the near future, I think the 3D graphics market for Linux is still too small to support an entire company.

So the company was offering a product with a steep learning curve missing numerous features one would expect from a product in its price range for about the same price as several entrenched competitors.

Their answer to this was to try to establish a web based 3D format. I just don't see NaN out-marketing Macromedia.

Re:Figures

[Anonymous Coward]

The lesson of the "Blender fiasco" is not that commercial software is wrong or "built on sand". Although the original poster who spoke of cheap Linux users was a bit harsh, he was a bit closer to the truth. The major strengths of Linux are its open source nature and the fact that it is free. There is a plethora of good, free software, but it sometimes lacks a certain polish. The people who write open source software have other jobs and don't always have the time and resources to dedicate to a software project. The GIMP is pretty cool, but Adobe spends millions of dollars and a ridiculous number of man hours from a dedicated team, while the GIMP is a hobbyist project (if skillfully conceived and rendered) where free time after work or class is spent working on it, not the entire work week. The problem is, you have a professional, well made piece of software like Blender released for Linux how do you manage to make make sure that quality is high, generate a profit, and make it attractive to users who rarely have to pay for software? Open source is wonderful; it ensures that software lives on and it allows for user level changes to be implemented, but people who spend all of their waking hours working on quality software should be entitled to some compensation for their efforts from the end users who find their product to be useful. There really needs to be strides made in the Linux community to find a happy medium when it comes to the open source vs. commercial holy wars.