Wow, TIL; I had always thought of it as an open source project, but I guess it wasn’t always!
In May 2002, Roosendaal started the non-profit Blender Foundation, with the first goal to find a way to continue developing and promoting Blender as a community-based open-source project. On July 18, 2002, Roosendaal started the “Free Blender” campaign, a crowdfunding precursor.[19][20] The campaign aimed at open-sourcing Blender for a one-time payment of €100,000 (US$100,670 at the time), with the money being collected from the community.[21] On September 7, 2002, it was announced that they had collected enough funds and would release the Blender source code. Today, Blender is free and open-source software, largely developed by its community as well as 26 full-time employees and 12 freelancers employed by the Blender Institute.[22]
Wow, TIL; I had always thought of it as an open source project, but I guess it wasn’t always!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)