Ton Roosendaal

Ton Roosendaal, born 20 March 1960, is a Dutch software developer and film producer, best known as the original creator of Blender, the open-source 3D creation suite, and of Traces, an Amiga ray tracer that was its forerunner. After studying industrial design in Eindhoven he founded the animation studio NeoGeo in 1989, where he wrote software and began the in-house 3D tool that became Blender. When Not a Number, the company formed to market Blender, shut down in 2002, he founded the non-profit Blender Foundation and led a community campaign that raised 100,000 euros in seven weeks, allowing Blender to be released under the GNU General Public License on 13 October 2002. He chairs the foundation and in 2007 established the Blender Institute in Amsterdam, which coordinates Blender development and organizes open-content animation and game projects.