Ton Roosendaal to step down as Blender chairman and CEO | Hacker News Reader

Ton Roosendaal to step down as Blender chairman and CEO

cgchannel.com

379 pointscma79 comments

https://www.blender.org/press/blender-foundation-announces-n...

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.

> 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.

I could've written this comment, I swear to god. I'll add that Blender is my favorite FOSS project.

I've pitched Blender to NSF Review panels and the higher ups that come by those to visit as the way science should do software. Would love to know of others as successful as this, particularly as it crosses boundries to industry.

Can you elaborate on how Blender exemplifies “the way science should do software”? Are you talking specifically about some aspect like community governance, user experience, code quality, etc.?

Ditto! I was introduced to blender in the late (great!) 90's and had a lot of fun with it for years before I largely gave up on working in 3d graphics and started building a career as a programmer instead.

Sometimes I think of what could've been had I had the perseverance to stick with it, but mostly I'm just very grateful. Ton was a big part of that for sure, but a lot of others as well. WP (or waypay as I used to call him) who designed the Suzanne model (among a lot of other amazing artwork), Bart who was a pillar of the community and went on to found Blender Nation, and many more who really formed that community. Without it I doubt blender would be more than a footnote in the annals of history.

Massive congratulations to Ton for achieving what many (including me!) never thought possible. Huge, huge kudos!

> I'll add that Blender is my favorite FOSS project.

It couldn't be any other way. Even when you ignore the fact that it is free, Blender is literally a better modeling platform than 90% of the commercial alternatives that charge in the hundreds to thousands of dollars for their products.

My favorite thing about the project is the amazing turn about that they did with the UI about 10 years ago (or whenever that was, probably longer). They turned a complete disaster of an interface into a shining example to follow, and that's about when they won everyone's hearts and minds and basically took off in popularity.

For a program that does basically everything, the entire thing is one consistent, intuitive, user experience from beginning to end. I can't think of any other FOSS projects with this level of polish, and very few commercial ones.

I've only followed from a distance, but yes I think this too.

It's way more impressive to turn a project around, than have it good at the quality in question the whole time.

Path dependency? Not today, daemon!

Me too. I know me too comments suck, but I really agree so wholeheartedly I decided to subject you all to it anyway.

Ton for President of the World! =)

I think many could have written this, including me. Blender taught me much of what I know about 3D graphics, modeling, rendering, simulation, animation, and more, all from exploring it as a curious teen. Made the 3D graphics class I took at uni a decade later almost superfluous.

I have a similar sentiment. While attending university and learning Maya on SGIs, I recall finding Blender in 1997 and chatting with Ton a little in their IRC channel. Was never able to make a career out of it, but I sincerely miss how kind and helpful everyone was.

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.

Blender did everything The GIMP should have done. A very specialized software with complex UI done in a way that people WITHIN the industry praise.

I also remember downloading blender during my university years back in early 2004. Man was it crap compared to Maya or 3dMax. But nowadays it is incredible.

> Blender did everything The GIMP should have done.

Gimp is an amazing tool and its creators deserve our gratitude. Then there is Krita, which is another amazing tool and its creators deserve our gratitude. Then there is LibreOffice, ditto. Then there is KiCAD, ditto. Then there is ...

I am not saying this to detract from Ton's contributions. I am saying this because a lot of people have made contributions to the open source world and, by extension, to the lives of many people. We shouldn't be treating this as a competition.

I didn't see the parent comment as downloading the gimp so much as praising something blender specifically did well. The fact that it has had more impact within the industry is the evidence to support it.

Competitively, libre office has a fairly similar UI to the pre-ribbon office suite, which people at the time much preferred once the ribbon came around (before they got used to it anyway) but it hasn't had the same disruption that blender did. I suspect the file format compatibility issues and die-hard Excel fans have a lot to do with it, but it's an interesting counterpoint to the assertion that the UI is responsible for the difference in adoption rates.

Just my personal opinion (and there is of course no accounting for taste), but personally i consider libre/open office to have one of the worst UIs of any software i have ever used. (In fairness i haven't used it in a really long time, hence calling it "open"). I absolutely think usability issues are a major limiting factor for libreoffice.

The people who really drive ms office adoption are the ones who use it all day every day. They can't imagine a world without Excel, and (at the time) the cluttered formatting of the office controls were a power user's best friend.

When the Ribbon UI came around in office, it faced a ton of push back due to moving so many things around and hiding so many common operations, but the file format translation issues between office and alternatives kept people in the MS cage, I think.

Nowadays many users grew up with the ribbon, so it doesn't seem so painful.

I don't think its the ribbon.

I grew up pre-ribbon. I did not like the ribbon. MS Office 97 still had a way better UI than anything open/libre office did.

If i had to rank, i would say

Old pre-ribbon ms office > ms office with ribbon > [a large gap] open/libre office.

Two of the major contributions Ton made though are relevant.

The Blender team did not always accept code or suggestions. This has been a running theme with several people I've known that felt their work and/or ideas were rejected by people that didn't grasp their brilliance. There was a possibly unusual willingness to say no, but it was more discerning than with GIMP which gave off the appearance of vetoing virtually everything. (At one time all GIMP woes would be solved by CinePaint aka "Film Gimp").

But it was combined with the idea of the studio, in order to find out where exactly the pain points are to be addressed. In a sense this is agile software done right, where you get the users and devs alongside each other with a common goal. Unsurprisingly one result is the UI today is not mocked in the way it was 20 years ago, while the GIMP UI has remained a constant point of confusion.

> In a sense this is agile software done right, where you get the users and devs alongside each other with a common goal.

I'm not sure Blender development is "agile" in the traditional sense of the term because from the outside there are signs that it is slow paced with high inertia (specialists in charge of large features, planning over many months, purpose-specific contractors and GSoC projects, features that are delayed until they are ready), but they are certainly successful at delivering copious, high quality and high value features. Let's hope that the good leadership continues.

> while the GIMP UI has remained a constant point of confusion

If only...

Plus Gimp just works and its interface isn't that bad. It is far better than many modern apps that just don't have any significant functionality. I mean perhaps Photoshop is better in some ways, but it is not worth it to put up with Adobes Creative Toilet if you don't produce some specialized prints.

Krita is awesome too and does interfaces right as well. Bought it on Steam. But I still use Gimp since the use cases are different. But it might perhaps be worthwhile to put your open source project on Steam anyway to make some bucks. I would happily buy more.

Blender did make huge jumps in recent years. Suddly you couldn't even update as fast as they introduced new things. It is amazing by now but I would argue that its functionality was unfairly derided in the past while it was already quite capable for quite some time.

> Plus Gimp just works and its interface isn't that bad.

Gimp for a looooong time was a multi-window user interface, completely antithetical to almost any other application released in the last 20 years or so.

> Gimp for a looooong time was a multi-window user interface, completely antithetical to almost any other application released in the last 20 years or so.

Same as Mac software in the late 90s. GIMP is/allows MDI, tabs or whatever it is called. A decade old at least, Wikipedia is not clear if the change was "new feature" or "new default but avaliable before". Maybe Mac native software went that way too, no idea what is the trend there now. Most things reinvent everything including window management, poorly, inside a browser, anyway.

I think the GIMP hate is almost entirely down to the difference in its UI from Photoshop.

I use GIMP almost exclusively in my job. I have photoshop, but I know GIMP and I'm better with it. I make presentation pieces and fix images, do image data rescue and make fun pieces with it on the side, like posters for my bands and accidental art made by playing with sliders in the FX.

Its very versatile and capable, but it is almost entirely unlike photoshop, and since I grew up with it I vastly prefer GIMP over photoshop.

I don't think its because of being different to photoshop. I tried Gimp many times during the last maybe 15 years. The UI used to be so chaotic I could not find my way around. If I tried very hard, I was basically able to do everything I needed, but with so much effort. Years ago the UI was just bunch of floating toolbars on the desktop without the possibility (or at least I couldn't find a way at that time) to have a common backdrop. All the little settings and modals were just so hard to use it was very frustrating. I had the very same experience with Inkscape over the years. I want to like those project so much, I know a lot of effort is going into that, but it didn't work for me. Same experience was with blender before the big redesign. Now blender is simply awesome and pleasant to use. I hope for such transformation for Gimp and Inkscape. (and Audacity)

> I think the GIMP hate is almost entirely down to the difference in its UI from Photoshop.

I disagree. I use Affinity Photo 2, which also has a different interface, and it's so much easier to use than GIMP despite having more features.

Yeah and also Krita exists in the open source world and is very nice to use. People are just in denial about GIMP.

in earlier years, but in a way to this day, a significant factor against GIMP was not the UI - people could get used to the UI and did even when grumbling about it.

A big problem for a chunk of possible users was that GIMP's colour support sucked (and I believe it's still not really fixed). The moment you wanted to work outside RGBA at 8bits per channel, and maybe a bit playing with indexed color, you were in for a lesson in pain. And a lot of people wanted a tool they could earn money with, and that meant for a long time at least some amount of print work. And print, even digital printing, means CMYK. Later on photography started demanding HDR features. Even web these days will deal with non-RGB color spaces, and I am not talking about HDR.

Meanwhile GIMP's engine for years even if in UI you technically could select colours in CMYK, they were internally converted to RGB for calculations, then converted again. CinePaint, aka FilmGimp, started because people could not get patches for 48bit RGBA into mainline. And so on, and so on. Meanwhile Photoshop and other competitors would not only have a less divisive UI, but also additional features (I knew people who would choose Photoshop just for included pantone colour database).

This reads as "because I can do my job with it, it should be good enough for anyone". Making band posters is not really the same as being a professional creative using it all day long. It has not been adopted among those people, while Blender has. The reason is almost certainly because its UI sucks, not because it's "different".

Lack of features more likely IMO.

I never said that GIMP is better or more useful than blender or krita or photoshop, only that I am better with it, that it can do all of the photo and image editing I need, and that I think the UI is most of the problem for the people who dislike it.

I'm not punching at all.

I would recommend trying out GIMP again, it's gotten much nicer.

Still kinda stupid easy to accidentally have non-destructive edit filters making your entire computer fall over because you have these filters that are slow to apply... but the UI works out quite well now

The most significant reason that Blender is in its current position is because of the significant refactoring it undertook starting in version 2.5 I believe. 7 years brewing in the pot! It cant have been easy... but the outcome (Blender 2.8) is when we sersiolsy starting thinking about using it in our uni.

Captain Disillusion did a great breakdown (diss :) of that: https://youtu.be/1qSTcxt2t74?t=1273 (21m10s on for ~5 mins)

Yup. It picked a name that doesn't cause whiplash.

Honestly, yeah. I know on HN we’re all used to it and over it, but the general population is not.

Like, you can claim the weird name is a celebration of how anti-corporate and unfettered the team is, but whenever I try tell people about it for the first time, it’s super distracting and adds a lot of unnecessary friction. It always goes like this:

“Photoshop licenses are so expensive, I wish there was something cheaper since many of our team members don’t need all the features.”

“Have you tried GIMP? Now hold on, I know the—“

“I’m sorry, tried what?!”

“It’s got a weird name, but a lot of people find it a really good replacement for—“

“Wait, is it named after that BDSM guy from Pulp Fiction?”

“Well it’s an acronym… (sigh) but also, yes. But it’s really solid software people have been—“

“Why on Earth would you name a product after that guy?”

I think tools like git get past this issue by being so aggressively useful and now ubiquitous, but in the early stages of a project if you don’t have the massive adoption git had (which led to a positive feedback loop of more feature development leading to more users) then you can end up dragging your name like an albatross around your neck.

Honestly I find Blender much more offensive as a term, considering it actually comes up in daily life. I never hear anyone say “gimp”. But in context, neither usually bring up the wrong association for me…

In general I think naming is a vastly overblown issue. If bike shedders had their way, we would never have names as nondescript as Apple or Amazon, or as obscure as Google, yet they are wildly, unreasonably successful.

Gimp’s adoption problem lies elsewhere.

Never heard any of these meanings of "blender", which one comes up for you?

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Blender

Sorry lol, it’s apparently a strictly German expression meaning someone who’s all show and no substance. It was late and I got confused there for a second. Anyway, the point on Gimp stands. Although to be fair, a rebrand would hardly do any damage given how deeply unpopular it already is.

I think of the kitchen appliance, not sure where you are going here.

So in American English, the term “gimped” refers to someone who has a physical disability, usually affecting the way they walk. This term has largely fallen out of fashion though and isn’t used much anymore unless someone is very deliberately trying to be edgy.

Nowadays in America, if someone over the age of 30 (and many people under the age of 30) hear the word “gimp” or more specifically “the gimp”, their mind immediately flashes back to this scene from the incredibly popular movie Pulp Fiction (this clip is not safe for work and depicts sexual assault) https://youtu.be/PcZUjEWFpKs

If you check the first paragraph of the History section of GIMP’s Wikipedia page, you can see that this is not a coincidence, the creators did in fact name it after the character from that clip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP

So no, I don’t think this is an issue of “any interesting name being too controversial”. There are many places you could draw the line before getting to “let’s name our software after the Gimp from Pulp Fiction”.

I guess the question is: how did Ton afford to spend that much time on it? How did all the other contributors? And more importantly: would Gimp have been able to achieve the same thing?

I had a similar experience. I tried Blender for 10 minutes and the UI was unintuitive and just awful. Completely backwards from everything else.

A few years later, someone said I should try it again. It's finally good. And they were right. My whole team uses Blender now and we're very satisfied with it.

I've heard the same thing with GIMP: "Try it again. It's good now." Unfortunately, this isn't true and likely will never be.

Try Krita

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.

I wish more non-free software could be made free and open-source when its creators go defunct or lose interest in it. Another good example that brings a smile to my face is Duelyst[1]. The company behind it went under so they published the code and assets under CC0.

1: https://github.com/open-duelyst/duelyst

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.

Fantastic, what a run he had! Ton is obviously an epic leader who also happens to be a great guy!

I had the absolute fortune to work in a bigger project in which the Blender Foundation was a partner back in the early 2000s, and got to meet him on many occasions. We rotated our project-wide meetings, and held one in Amsterdam when the Blender Conference was up, and I got absolutely hooked on both Amsterdam and the Blender community.

I kept going to the Conference many times thereafter, even though I was never neither a developer or a user of Blender. It's just such a fantastic community, it was great to just hang out and soak up some happy vibes, and of course seeing and hearing Ton's voice (both literally and in the abstract as a leader) throughout it all.

To this day our kitchen wall has a huge photo poster from Amsterdam front and center, and both kids have heard so many stories of what a great town that is. :)

Ton is an absolute legend, on par with Linus or Carmack in my book. They made a documentary series about Blender featuring a lot of Ton Roosendaal and his team. It is quite foreshadowing of his retirement in retrospect, highly recommended:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_dZtidLwo4&list=PLa1F2ddGya...

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 remember Elysiun! :o)

Those were some good time. My handle back then was macke.

You know, I am sure I remember that handle! I was "kid tripod", in the UK back then.

Now I'm reminiscing about Yafray . . .

> 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.

As a very long-time Cubase user, how so?

The entire style and structure of the user interface; it has that look and feel of European audio software like Cubase or to a lesser degree Ableton.

Obviously Blender used to be famously quite different from that and basically all other commercial 3D software too. I appreciate that it didn't simply attempt to turn into a Maya/3DS clone.

I remember when the domain started redirecting to blenderartists.org.

I used to enjoy doing the speed modelling challenges :)

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 :)

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.

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

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.

Ton is a legend and a personal hero of mine. He is a great innovator and an open-source superstar who disrupted the entire industry, traditionally dominated by big corporations.

The entire Blender story is captivating - from modeler and raytracer prototypes on Amiga to the Internet bubble startup to the famous crowdfunding campaign to free Blender... It is a story that deserves a movie.

For anyone interested in open-source history who is not familiar with the Blender story, I would highly recommend Ton's interview with Blender Guru, where he reflects on his journey - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJEWOTZnFeg&t=1523s

Official announcement: https://www.blender.org/press/blender-foundation-announces-n...

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

Blender is one of those shining FOSS successes we should all learn from. I loved watching the BlenderGuru interview: https://youtu.be/qJEWOTZnFeg

Thank you, Ton!

Ton has been a hero of mine ever since I started using Blender at the age of 9. That software was my childhood. I became very emotional watching him hand the baton to the rest of the team. Feels like the end of an era.

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

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.

The project history is also crucial to understand:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)#History

TLDR- it was an in-house editor through several bankrupted companies, and the code was purchased (assets) for $100k by the community and subsequently released and stewarded to where it is today. Truly an OSS and community home run!

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.

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!

Thank you, Ton. The world will forever be a better place for your work.

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.

What an absolute legend.

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

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

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

breath of fresh air compared to mullenweg or DHH.

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