Blender was born as a set of software tools for 3D animation developed for the in-house production of the Dutch animation firm NeoGeo.
In 1998 the firm Not a Number, known as NaN, was established, whose objective was to continue the development and marketing of Blender. NaN's strategy was based on the idea of distributing, free of charge, the basic animation system and implementing a business model based on the sale of additional services and products, aimed at those who used Blender for commercial applications.
Despite achieving resounding success in its "presentation in partnership" during Siggraph 2000, the trading results were not very fortunate and in April 2001 NaN had to drastically reduce and start trading with a new group of investors. Six months later, NaN launched Blender Publisher, its first commercial product, which was basically aimed at producing interactive 3D environments for web-based applications.
A short time later, the scarce response of the market led the new management of NaN to close the firm and indefinitely suspend the development of Blender. Then, Ton Roosendaal, the original creator of the package, decided to establish a non-profit organization whose initial purpose was to try to prevent the disappearance of the product.
In July 2002, the Blender Foundation started the "Free Blender" campaign, which aimed to raise through the web the amount of € 100,000 to buy from the owners of NaN the rights to the source code of Blender and thus be able to turn it into an open source project. To the surprise of many, the campaign managed to get this amount in just seven weeks, and on October 13, 2002 Blender was delivered to the internet community under the terms of the GNU General Public License (see http://es.gnu.org/Licencias/fdles.html).
After managing to turn Blender into a piece of free software, the foundation has dedicated itself to coordinating the efforts of the teams of volunteers who continue to contribute to the development of the package and to providing support to the companies that are already beginning to develop modules for special applications, such as motion capture, development of games and virtual reality applications.
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