NaN Closes Shop, The End of Blender?

lowell writes "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. " Nice app. Too bad really.

Slashdot reaction to failed open source companies

[markov_chain]

Scenario: company Foo making app Bar figures out they cannot survive by selling free software

Slashdot: The great people at Foo, makers of Bar, are going to have to close their doors due to lack of $$$. Remember Bar? Nice app. Too bad, really. Yawn. Allright, where's that new DVD I ordered?

Re:Please release the source under GPL

[torinth]

It's a good wish to get Blender ousted into the open-source domain, but unfortunately unlikely. If they are decalring bankruptcy, that means they have creditors that they owe. And if they owe money, they (usually - maybe not in Amsterdam?) will be encouranged to liquidate their assets, like Blender, to another company who will pay for the technology. So getting it open-sourced is probably not an option on the table.

-Andrew

Lack of Apps.

[Picass0]

Owch. This is a bad day to be a Linux desktop user.

NaN folding will strengthen the argument that there are not enough good desktop applications for Linux. It will also strengthen the claims that Linux users will not pay for software.

I doubt we will see OpenBlender. NaN may not be able to GPL Blender, as the code for that application is the only company assest they can leverage to pay off it's debt. We also don't know if they licensed any code from external contractors.

I have a strong interest in 3D animation, I am a Linux user, and Blender was it for me. There are no other 3d programs under Linux with it's level of sophistication. I hate dual booting to Windows to use Lightwave.

Loki is gone - no games. Blender is gone - no 3d.

This makes the siren's song of OSX go up a couple of decibles.

Re:Maybe they will Open Source it now.

[neuroticia]

Cool idea. Find an app you really like and then refuse to buy it until it goes out of business then try to get the owners of the source to donate it to the 'community' that put them out of business. ;)

Let's see. Who do we want to put out of business today?

-Sara

Re:/me is sad

[rho]

If I remember correctly, Duckpins and Hampster were done using Hash Animation Master. Hash is a good proggy--I've played with it a bit.

Blender is better in a lot of ways, but Hash is tough to beat for ease of use. Blender is tough to beat for difficulty of use. Until you learn the gestalt of it, you do a lot of guessing ("what does this button do....AAAAAGGGH!").

Re:Please release the source under GPL

[Dan D.]

bad news for those that paid for licenses.

How so? I paid for a license (a while back now, so I haven't renewed any) and I'd be delighted in it being open sourced. I paid because I wanted NaN to be profitable and keep working on the product. I don't have time to work on a full 3d modeller myself, but I have plenty of use for one, so I'll pay someone else to work on it.

Of course now I feel guilty I didn't pay more, hope they do open it and hope someone with more time than I works on it.

Blender Bitching

[Craig Maloney]

Y'know, I'm a little tired of the people slamming this application. Honestly I think it was, and is a very good 3D application. Sure it wasn't the fastest, or the most intuitive, and it didn't have the bells and whistles of the competition, but it did have some very good and unique ideas. How many other 3D applications had a game engine built into it? The trouble with Blender is it was the first to truly put a 3D plugin of any value into a web browser, and it was one of the first to create a fully 3D game construction set. Being the first as a fledgling company doesn't translate to much, except when the finger pointing comes into play when you fail.

Thank you Ton and company for the many hours of rewarding 3D creation. Maybe someday the finger-pointers will wake up and realize what they've lost.

Figures

[Anonymous Coward]

A company makes an innovative software product, and can't remain afloat, thanks in part to the pathological cheapness of the Linux crowd.

The company goes into bankruptcy and there are already numerous suggestions on /. that the company GPL the source code, with no mention of the possibility that the company could reorganize and become viable.

Am I the only one who sees how poisonous this attitude is? "Why the hell should we pay for it? If we don't pay then the company will go out of business and we'll get it for free, anyway." Normally you have to deal with professional politicians to see that level of shortsightedness and arrogance.

Keep it up, cheapskates, and Linux will never grow (in the desktop market) beyond being a hacker toy. You're the ones who all but completely destroyed the Linux book market, sent Mandrake into begging mode, and did who knows what other damage to your own cause and other businesses. I hope you're happy; I'm sure Bill Gates is delighted by how savagely you treat your own.

Re:Blender?

[Psion]

Sorry to disagree, but this "pig" had the smallest footprint of any decent modeling/rendering application out there. Until quite recently, it fit on a single floppy, was available for a bunch of platforms (even IPaq!), and had a growing grassroots community that extended its capabilities and supported the product in a way superior to even the most high-end graphics applications. Unfortunately, their business model wasn't the most solid, and I genuinely believe they over-extended themselves when they decided to get into game engines and web applications. Keep it lean and mean, fellas.

Re:Lack of Apps.

[FreeUser]

Maya (possibly the preeminent 3D animation app) is available under Linux. It's just out of your freebie pricerange.

Freebie? You're making an unfair baseless assumption about me. I do buy software, and did support Blender financially.

You can get your first copy for a mere $5500 or so, you cheap GNU/Linux user you! :-)

I agree. I've payed for plenty of apps under Linux, including Applix, various games, etc. But Maya's pricetag puts it well out of any hobbiests price range ... and comes with the same uncertainty as blender: if and when the app disappears, or changes and becomes unsupported, what happens to the hours of animation work I've done? Am I forced to spend another $5k for an upgrade I can't afford or, even worse, left with no recourse (and useless, may-as-well-be-randomized data)?

I will do all my future animation work only under GPLed or BSDed software, even if that means writing modules myself to do what I need. The time I saved by using Blender I just lost, big time, with compounded interest. The animations I've done will grow less and less useful with time, ultimately (in a year or two) becoming worthless as it becomes more and more difficult to get the aging Blender binary I have (the latest version prior to their disappearance) running against current libraries and software versions.

RMS and the Free Software Foundation were right all along, and I, in my "pragmatism," was very shortsighted and very wrong.

Never again will I make that mistake.

Re:Blender?

[Psion]

You should have stuck it out, Andy. I too came from other programs and was disoriented by the product, but it was the only one available on a range of machines I was likely to use that had most of the features I wanted. So I worked through the tutorials and eventually found the environment very useful for developing and animating models.

Of course, now I've also spent a lot of time on an application that may never see another update again...

Re:Figures

[AxelBoldt]

You got it backwards. People like you, who applaud every commercial app on Linux and want Linux to "succeed in the marketplace", are shortsighted. Every commercial app is built on sand; the company dies, gets bought out or decides to discontinue the product, and it's over. There is never any security unless you have a decent free software license in hand. That's the lesson of the Blender fiasco. Never use nor support non-free software.

Re:Figures

[Synn]

I love how when 100 windows oriented companies go down the drain each day it's because of bad business practices.

But when a company goes down and happens to make a Linux port on the side, why then it went under because the Linux crowd is a bunch of cheap bastards.

Mirror of Blender

[baffle]

I'm mirroring the files on ftp://ftp.stenstad.net/mirrors/ftp.blender.nl/ now, as ftp.blender.nl seems down..

And so it goes...

[Eric Damron]

I use to believe that companies that gave their software freely would still receive enough support from the "grateful" thousands (sometimes millions) to survive.

But with the demise of Blender and the cries for help from Mandrake that are being met mostly by a lot of "I'll use Mandrake but I'll never pay for it. That's what open source is all about so if they fail they fail..." replies, I don't think so anymore.

I just don't believe that a company that produces free software can make it in a community that is mostly devoid of compassion or common sense or whatever it is that will make a person take out their wallet and send so cold hard case to a company that provides them with a service even though they don't gain anything extra by doing so.

What should be leaned but won't from the failures of companies like this is that you may not gain anything extra by sending in some of your money but, in the long run, you will lose if you don't.

I'm just really bummed out to realize that we will always carry the Microsoft yoke because as a society we are incapable of breaking out of the box and doing what it takes to support the people who would empower us all.