The Blender Foundation and the Blender Institute
The Blender Foundation is the corporation that organizes Blender’s development and any projects related to the software, such as Open Movies, conferences, and training. The foundation operates from the Blender Institute, where the main infrastructure for blender.org is located.
The head of the Blender Foundation is Ton Roosendaal. He organizes and sets the goals for the software and anything else related to Blender. Everyone can make proposals about features they’d like to see added to Blender, and after the main development team analyzes them to see which of them are feasible, the team begins development. This is very different from the development of commercial software, where the company decides what needs to be done and developers have no say in what is added to the software.
In fact, Blender’s users don’t even need to request new features; they can just go ahead and develop a feature themselves and send it to the foundation afterward. If it is found useful and interesting, and it fits the Blender guidelines (it has to be consistent with the rest of the software), the main development team will work on adding it to the official Blender version.
The Blender Foundation hires some developers to complete specific tasks, but most developers are volunteers who lend their time in order to learn and practice using the software, or just because they want to participate in its ongoing development. Some developers even raise their own funds to create and perfect the features they want to see in Blender.
Because it is open-source software, Blender has trunk versions and branches. The trunk version is the official version released at blender.org and it contains the stable features of Blender. Branches are development versions for testing new features, or alternative features that may or may not make it into the official trunk version at some point. (Commercial software also uses this method, but it’s all internal: you can’t go and create your own branch or test development versions unless the company that owns the software releases a beta version to generate feedback before the software’s actual release.)
Of course, it would be chaotic if everyone could just step in and add their own ideas to the software, so the Blender Foundation’s main tasks have become organizing all of the developers in one place, defining priorities, and deciding what features make it to the final official version. The foundation determines which features need branches and which branches should be removed. It also provides and maintains the platform for Blender, and operates the bug-tracker system in which users can report bugs that are then assigned to specific developers for correction (and they’re usually really fast).
Note
If you’re interested in testing development versions of Blender, you can visit www.graphicall.org and www.developer.blender.org, where you can find the version for your system. This is not recommended if you aren’t an experienced user as these versions are experimental and unstable, so you must use them at your own discretion.
The foundation also decides how donations are spent. Above all, the Blender Foundation is the nerve center of Blender development, and the Blender Institute is its physical location on the planet.
The Blender Foundation also organizes Open Movies with several goals:
Raising money: People pay for the movies in advance, so the movie and its tutorials fund their own development.
Testing Blender in production: Making a movie is the best way to test how Blender responds in a production environment. It provides developers with an opportunity to fix issues and discover what features can be improved.
Improving Blender: Usually, each Open Movie has a goal. The goal of Sintel was to test the new version of the software and make it stable and production ready. Tears of Steel was made to improve Blender’s visual-effects capabilities. Thus, each Open Movie has a list of features to add that ultimately improve Blender and many users help raise money for the movie so they can also enjoy using these features in the future.
Generating content for the Blender Cloud: Blender Cloud is a service that people can subscribe to (it’s also meant to help raise money for Blender’s development), where the Blender Foundation publishes video tutorials and content created for Open Movies with educational purposes.
Demonstration: With these kinds of projects, the foundation demonstrates Blender’s capabilities and shows the world that Blender is absolutely usable in a professional production environment.