Blender (program)

Blender is a free computer program for modelling and rendering three-dimensional scenes and animations. It has a highly idiosyncratic user interface, which has been criticized as unintuitive but defended as very efficient.

The program was initially distributed for free (but without source code), with a manual available for sale. It now runs on all Windows flavors, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Irix and MacOS X.

Originally, the program was developed as an in-house application by the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo[?]; the main author, Ton Roosendaal, founded Not a Number Technologies in June 1998 to further develop and distribute the program. The company went bankrupt in 2002 and the debtors agreed to release Blender as free software, under the terms of the GNU General Public License, for a payment of €100,000. On July 18, 2002, a Blender Funding Company was founded by Roosendaal in order to collect donations; on September 7, it was announced that enough funds had been collected and that the Blender source code would be released in October. This donation strategy is unofficially called the Street Performer Protocol.