Happy Open Source Anniversary, Blender!

Today is October 13th, the 23rd anniversary of Blender becoming open source.

In case you didn't know, Blender wasn't always open source. I won't go into the full history of Blender here; the Blender website has a great page that gives the history in full detail. But the TL;DR version is that Blender was originally an in-house tool for a Dutch production company, which spun off to its own company, and ultimately became one of the first examples of a piece of software that was "liberated" by its community... and one of the earliest examples of effective crowdfunding.

The community raised 100,000€ well before any of the established platforms for crowdfunding ever existed. It was a pretty incredible feat.

And here we are, 23 years later, still going strong.

Blender is the most popular open source 3D tool (arguably the most popular of all 3D tools) and has seen countless updates in that time. And the community continues to grow at an incredible rate. It's truly amazing and something we at Autotroph and Superhive are honored to be a part of. And when I say "we", I mean all of us, from the customers and creators that come to the site every day to everyone on our own team. Every one of us is part of the Blender community and we should all celebrate this great 3D tool that we use.

So, Happy Open Source Anniversary, Blender!🎉

Now, as part of celebrating, we didn't make a cake, but Superhive does have something cooking.

Keep your eyes on the Superhive blog (or emails from Superhive, if you're subscribed to our newsletter), because next week we're doing something BIG. Stay tuned.