The Blender project team has received support from three well-known organizations.
Embark Studios began financing a project at the Corporate Gold level. This means that their contributions to the development of the Blender project should be at least € 30,000 per year. Embark Studios talked about their decision to fund the project in "A Love Letter to Blender" on this resource.
We use Blender because it’s a great piece of software. It’s fast and reliable, and its community makes it better every day. We’re also fans of how Blender makes game development more accessible and collaborative, something that is right in line with our own long-term mission.
For too long our industry has been walled-off, with expensive software licenses posing a barrier for non-professionals to even get started. All that is beginning to change now, and Blender is a great example of what happens when powerful software is made available for everyone to use, and communities start to work together to change the status quo.
On top of all this, Ebark Studios has announced plans to open source some of their own Blender tools, which you can find here. Several of these tools are available on GitHub under the MIT license.
After NVIDIA began financing Blender, AMD did not want to stay away. Therefore, they also began to invest their money in the development of the project. AMD gets the level of Patron. This means that they will invest at least € 120,000 annually. A post on Twitter was made about this:
Today AMD joined the Blender Foundation Development Fund at Patron level. We will invest it in general development, Vulkan migration and to keep AMD technologies well supported for our users. Thanks a lot!
Another new financier for the Blender project is Adidas. They received the status of Corporate Silver. This means that their contributions should be at least € 12,000 per year.
You can see the organizations that fund the Blender project here.
During this year, the Blender project received support from NVIDIA, AMD, Embark Studios, Adidas, Epic Games and Ubisoft. It is good to know that such large organizations are involved in the development of open source software.