We'll match you today!

The Superhive October Blend Fest is still going strong. And today we have something interesting for you.

The whole reason we're doing this event is to celebrate Blender's 23 years of being open source, right? In a lot of ways, it's the reason we're all here doing cool things in 3D. I don't want to get too bleak or depressing, but let's take a moment and imagine what life would be like without it. Without the community coming together to make Blender open source, there probably wouldn't be a Blender. I daresay there wouldn't even be anything like it. Without a freely available tool like Blender, a lot of people might not have ever found their passion in 3D. A bunch of folks wouldn't be making a living in 3D or art or any of the other industries that Blender has touched. Superhive wouldn't exist, and neither would any of the other things we do as Autotroph. I know my own life would be completely different.

This event is about celebrating Blender. With that in mind, it's worth diving down a rabbit hole like this to regain perspective on how great things really are. This community is fantastic. You are fantastic. And, of course, Blender continues to be fantastic. And it continues to be fantastic as a result of our efforts as a community. We make great work that proves Blender isn't some little "toy app." We write code that directly improves Blender for everyone who uses it. We create training that helps everyone improve their skills. We make assets that speed up each other's workflows. We build tools on top of Blender to make it better or easier to use. And we contribute to the Blender Dev Fund to help pay for even more improvements.

And that's the spirit that we're using to celebrate today. Two of the biggest drivers of Blender's development have been the community of developers who are sometimes supported by the Blender Dev Fund and the creators of tools, assets, and training that are available on Superhive.

Today, we celebrate both!

How? I'm glad you asked.

Superhive is going to make a donation to the Blender Dev Fund. Now, by itself, that may not sound impressive. Autotroph is already a Corporate Gold sponsor of the Blender Dev Fund. And Superhive itself also already makes donations to the Dev Fund on behalf of the Creators who sell on the site (it's those hearts that you see on some products here). But we're going to do more.

In celebration of Blender's 23 years of open source, we're going to donate 23% of the money we make today directly to the Blender Dev Fund. To be clear, we're not taking any money away from the Creators who sell products on the site. This is only from the money that Superhive makes as a portion of each sell. And that is how you support both Creators and the Blender Dev Fund at the same time. Regardless of whether the Creator contributes to the Dev Fund themselves, we're going to send 23% of our portion of every sale to the Blender Foundation.

But we can only really do this for one day. Today. So let's see how much we can raise for the Blender Dev Fund! Maybe you've been looking at a product, waiting for a good excuse to go ahead and get it. Maybe it's even in your wishlist. I'd like to suggest that today's event is the good excuse that you've been waiting for. Let's make it happen.

I'll report back once we crunch all the numbers and see how much that donation ends up being. I'm excited to see what we can do together.