What really kickstarted their development... was the introduction of the Blender Development Fund -- https://fund.blender.org/
Before that, I'd say open sourcing the project is what really gave it a second wind.
If I remember a talk correctly by Ton Roosendaal, the company behind Blender development went bankrupt and development stopped for a while, as it was closed-source at that point. Eventually, he started a fundraiser to get funds to re-acquire Blender and open sourcing it (the goal being 100K EUR or something) which was successful and made Blender into the open source project we know today :)
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Before that, I'd say open sourcing the project is what really gave it a second wind.
If I remember a talk correctly by Ton Roosendaal, the company behind Blender development went bankrupt and development stopped for a while, as it was closed-source at that point. Eventually, he started a fundraiser to get funds to re-acquire Blender and open sourcing it (the goal being 100K EUR or something) which was successful and made Blender into the open source project we know today :)