I have started a petition on PetitionOnline.com to make blender open source. The url is:
At the risk of sounding like a jerk…
Blender is not run by a democracy…
Petitions won’t mean jack to whoever rescues the company (and if no one steps up to the plate… a petition still won’t mean squat.)
I for one would rather a competent business came to the rescue and put a devlopment plan on track…
Jason 
why not a petition to redhat to rescue it and make it opensource?
blender is a key linux app after all for certain users.
I second that. I’m not sure why the Blender community was being accused (in another thread) for being sedentary when Blender’s development is clearly out of our hands and doesn’t belong to us in the first place. In addition to that, we don’t seem to have very good communication with NaN; none of us really know what’s going on, except that they are “restructuring” and/or shopping around for a potential buyer.
What can we do? Petition the starving authors to release their source code? It could benefit us, but it won’t benefit them because they won’t make a single Dutch guilder from this free give-away. This is just my point of view.
But, hey, a petition is a very noble idea. 
why not a petition to redhat to rescue it and make it opensource?
blender is a key linux app after all for certain users.
Perhaps we could get SGI to ‘rescue’ it. Then at least it would work on SGI’s again. Remember? The platform on which blender was originally developed and released for (And no, we’re not talking Traces here)
At the risk of angering the Dutch Gods… I must ask Macke for a clarification…
You say that Blender was “originally devloped and released” for the SGI platform…
Actually, wasn’t it just “released.”
I remember Ton saying in an email that blender started as “an amateurs attempt at a raytracer on the AMIGA…”
Yay Amiga!!!
Jason[/quote]
Sprite:
won’t make a single Dutch guilder from this free give-away.
Hehe, you’re slow to catch on aren’t you? We don’t deal in Guilders any more. It’s euro’s, remember that.
However I too believe that this is not gonna happen. I don’t think an opensource Blender is gonna happen until the last one of those NaN ppl is dead (sounds kindda morbid doesn’t it…). Well don’t take me the wrong way, I just don’t think it’s a good idea for them to go opensource.
Adues,
WeWa
At the risk of angering the Dutch Gods… I must ask Macke for a clarification…
You say that Blender was “originally devloped and released” for the SGI platform…
Actually, wasn’t it just “released.”
I remember Ton saying in an email that blender started as “an amateurs attempt at a raytracer on the AMIGA…”
Yay Amiga!!!
Didn’t I say I didn’t talk about Traces? =P
Traces was the one developed on Amiga afaik. Blender was developed on the SGI platform, and eventually also released for the SGI platform, with a release for shrugs linux stringing along afterwards.
=P
I guess this is a question for the pro-lifers… 
Was Traces the fetus… and Blender the baby…
Was the fetus life or the borne baby…?
Which came first, the chicken or the egg…
SGI is having a hard enough time rescuing themselves to try doing it for anyone else. They have been selling assets left right & centre. Maybe during their peak they could have done.
I find it kinda interesting that only a few years ago ILM made a deal with SGI that was supposed to be lucrative and financially sound…
Then a year ago I hear that they slowly started “augmenting” their SGI workstations with Linux-based computers…
What happened…? As if I ned to ask…
Sorry. I stand corrected. But remember, I’m a computer geek, so I rarely see sunlight in the first place… 
ok. some oldies might or might not remember me. i haven’t been actively involved in the ‘community’ in a while now…
but…
being an oldie i remember a quote of Ton’s.
Ton always used to say (particularly when Blender first went out on its own after NeoGeo with the new Company NaN) that if NaN ever died he would at least make Blender open source so it wouldn’t die.
He used to repeat that like a promise.
i am not an opensource zealot. any who know me know that. i am also not suggesting that Ton or NaN are ‘over’. i believe thiat blender is his baby and belongs to him. i don’t know what the legal situation is since investors and all that crap went on…
bottom line.
Ton may not ‘know best’ (proven now, perhaps?) but it’s his call. i just wanted to remind everyone that he had a contingency plan once. perhaps he still does.
Traces was a raytracing and animation program writtien in Basic on the Amiga. NeoGeo then moved to the SGI platform where they developed Blender in C. Traces was similiar to Blender in many aspects (except the raytracer, of course), it even had a funny IKA system.
NeoGeo then tried itself at doing games and the ability to make realtime content was added to Blender plust there was the port to the Playstation I. The game adventure ended in NeoGeo braking apart, though, and then Ton decided that Blender was too nice to not give away and he released the SGI version, but soon ported it to the then-shiny-and-hip-new-kid-on-the-block called Linux (this time working as NaN). From what I know Blender had realtime “version” that was kept in-house from the beginning on - at least I recall seing a 1.64 realtime screenshot someplace in 1999 (or so).
.xype
do you mean there was a player for Blender realtime content on PSone cos that would be darn(!) cool . . . ! i’d love to know what kind of performance that would get.
Ton said when he released the first public SGI version that the realtime stuff was there, but not to be released. I still have an old 1.64 (I think) build with realtime stuff, though its a windows build. Realtime stuff was cooler then than it is now, speaks for itself doesn’t it?
it also had a render daemon builtin too.
ah yes!
I am not totally sure, but we say Blender games running on the Black Playstation and I think it might have been the Blender player ported to the PS. That’s where the idea to make PS2 games with Blender actually comes from, but it was more a idea of marketing people than anything else since the developer licence for PS2 costs you an arm and a leg. With PS1 you might know that there was a 1000 $ “Black” Playstation for which you could develop from your PC off. It didn’t run on normal PS1s though.
.xype
ah yes, the net yaroze! anyway, just to finish again, why was the realtime stuff better than it is now?