A Hamilton BBS run by RaymondBurgess (ProfEric); featuring artwork by AndrewMcGregor. Very cool. Died when its tape backup crashed and was replaced by Ritual Idea.

Blender Creator is a free and fully functional 3D modeling, rendering,
animation and game creation package for Unix and Windows.

Blender Creator is distributed without sources, it is exclusively developed and maintained by the Dutch company NaN Technologies B.V.

http://www.blender3d.com

15th March 2002
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.

July 2002
The owner of Blender, NaN Holding BV, has decided on a definite new future for Blender. The independent non-profit organisation Blender Foundation will obtain a license to continue Blender development by publishing and maintaining the sources and make it 'free software' or 'open source' forever.

What the NaN Holding shareholders and the Foundation agree on:

• publishing the full Blender sources, including old and new development, under the GNU GPL license ('Free Software'). The NaN mobile technology will not be included in this.
• the Foundation has to pay in advance a one time fee of 100k euro for this (100k USD). After payment, the sources will be opened.
• the Foundation will organize a funding campaign, and can exploit the old Blender website and re-establish e-shop services for this.
• the Foundation can offer an additional commercial non-copylefted (BSD style) license for companies to integrate with non-GPL projects.
• NaN Holding will be sufficiently enabled to (re)start business in the future, for example licensing derived technology or by offering professional services.

NaN Holding recognizes that, giving all circumstances and the current economic situation, moving on with Blender to this next stage will be the most beneficial thing to do, to protect past investments, but also to respect everything that has been realized until now by the NaN companies and the world-wide user community.

The Blender Foundation has started a world wide funding campaign, to both finance the one-time license fee as to cover general services and exploitation. After launching the sources, the Foundation will establish user services, for both artists and coders. Access to sources and web services will be free then.

Amsterdam, july 2002

info@blender3d.com

Blender is now free software!