o7

I wish more businesses followed his footsteps in making their products free and open source and run by nonprofits

His work has enabled so much creativity and he gets to give great software away for free, what a chad.

He is such a great person and helped soo much fostering an amazing community. He will still be around and the people that will be leading Blender and its community are amazing also :)

Ton is a personal hero of mine. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a 3d animator because of Ton. I discovered Blender in the early 2000s as a kid. It was my first exposure to digital art tools because it was free. When Blender open sourced in 2002 it was a massive gift to kids around the world like me. (Ton was kind enough to reply to an email of mine at the time thanking him!)

Ton and Blender have brought so much value to the world by making world-class creation tools available to everyone. Blender is one of the most successful open source projects of all time -- going from an underdog project notorious for difficult to use UI to a polished, ubiquitous, industry shaping tool. And never losing sight of the art; it still brings a huge smile to my face when Blender ships another Open Movie. Nearly ~25 years later, thank you again Ton.