making visuals with technology

For those of you following the Blender development scene, you might realize we have reached a remarkable milestone today. The Blender source code has had its 25000th revision on November 29th, 2009. This means since October 2002, when Blender was released as an open source package, twenty-five-thousand individual commits had been made towards the Blender source code.

Although this arbitray number is no way a direct measurement of the enormous effort that went into the making of this great software package (some commits are one line patches while others are gigantic multi-project merges), nor does the number 25000 have anything to do with the release of Blender 2.5, I think it’s still an amazing accomplishment that we should all celebrate, artists and developers alike.

October 2002 - November 2009

The above graph shows the commit frequency since Blender went open source in October 2002(including all branches).  Just look at that graph!  It’s going no where else but up!

The pie chart below shows the total commit broken down by author.  By no mean am I trying to belittle all the contributors who did not make it onto the list.  Blender is a community project, every single slice of pie is a contribution, no matter how small.  And again, a commit is not a direct measure of how much work one has put into it, so don’t read too much into it.

October 2002 - November 2009

This milestone is really only made possible because of the collective contribution from the entire global Blender community.  If you are reading this, you probably already contributed something to the community, so give yourself a pat on the back.  Even if you have no coding experience?  You can buy Blender movies, books or gears.  No Money?  You can help out by documenting features on the wiki, or even just filing a report bugs can be extremely useful.