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

Re:Blender?

[paRcat]

um, with all due respect, "a couple times" isn't enough to understand a 3D design app.

As any real blender user will tell you, once you learn the interface it's one of the fastest modelers out there.

Re:Please release the source under GPL

[geirt]

Anonymous Coward wrote:
>It's already GPLed, Einstien.

Wrong.

from Freshmeat:

Per the license: "You are hereby granted permission to copy and distribute the Software without written agreement from NaN, only for non-commercial purposes."

Other parts of the software, such as the blender render daemon, are fully Open Source and Free Software, released under the new BSD license.

Re:Please release the source under GPL

[Dan D.]

bad news for those that paid for licenses.

How so? I paid for a license (a while back now, so I haven't renewed any) and I'd be delighted in it being open sourced. I paid because I wanted NaN to be profitable and keep working on the product. I don't have time to work on a full 3d modeller myself, but I have plenty of use for one, so I'll pay someone else to work on it.

Of course now I feel guilty I didn't pay more, hope they do open it and hope someone with more time than I works on it.

Blender Bitching

[Craig Maloney]

Y'know, I'm a little tired of the people slamming this application. Honestly I think it was, and is a very good 3D application. Sure it wasn't the fastest, or the most intuitive, and it didn't have the bells and whistles of the competition, but it did have some very good and unique ideas. How many other 3D applications had a game engine built into it? The trouble with Blender is it was the first to truly put a 3D plugin of any value into a web browser, and it was one of the first to create a fully 3D game construction set. Being the first as a fledgling company doesn't translate to much, except when the finger pointing comes into play when you fail.

Thank you Ton and company for the many hours of rewarding 3D creation. Maybe someday the finger-pointers will wake up and realize what they've lost.

Blender was Fantastic

[FreeUser]

As any real blender user will tell you, once you learn the interface it's one of the fastest modelers out there.

That is absolutely correct.

I've been working on a film project using blender for some time, and have tried other 3d animation products on other platforms and blender was, hands down, the best at nearly everything one needs to do to make good, high quality animations. There were, of course, failings, and some things for which one would choose to use another tool, but for the vast majority of tasks it was excellent and, as you say, once you learn the interface, the most intuitive without sacrificing power and features.

This is really tragic. I really, really hope they GPL the source so that the project may live on, but I have a feeling this is going to be an example where the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman's much maligned stance of "avoid proprietary software at all costs, you'll pay in the end if you don't" may very well be vindicated, in the form of hundreds of hours of animation work that will become less and less usable as the existing binaries age and become more and more difficult to get running (as glibc and other libraries change with time).

If anyone from NaN is reading, please, please, please GPL the blender code.

As an aside I am surprised they didn't go with the "you pay for the release today, or wait 12 months and get the features in the GPLed version." Many would have paid, and the delayed, GPLed version would have been insurance against this kind of thing happening. Oh well, twenty-twenty hindsight and all that ...

:-(

Yes there is an Opensource Alternative...

[Wolfier]

Let's pull some resources to port it.

http://www.openfx.org

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

[Error27]

I personally like tooling around with k-3d.

As a non-animator I first installed Blender and immediately became deeply confused and gave up.

A while later, I installed k3d. There was no .deb available, but it was simple to install. On start up k3d offers a brilliant tutorial on animating. The tutorial moves the mouse around and shows you how to create new shapes, modify them, and move the camera around etc.

Within an hour I learned how to make animations with dancing deformed tea pots.

K3d is GPL. It's available under windows as well, but that's a massive pain in the butt to install.