Going on a Blender

Blender has always been one of my favourite open source projects, not least for the inspirational way money was raised by the common folk to make proprietary code open. Similarly, the open film "Elephant's Dream" was a good example of innovative thinking.

Now they're at it again:

As a follow-up to the successful project Orange's "Elephants Dream", the Blender Foundation will initiate another open movie project. Again a couple of the best 3D artists and developers in the Blender community will be invited to come together to work in Amsterdam on completing a short 3D animation movie.

...

As a second open project, the Blender Foundation and Crystal Space community are going to cooperate on organizing an Open Game. This will become possible thanks to the support by the NLGD Conference, the "Nederlandse Game Dagen", the annual conference for the Netherlands game industry.

This project will have as a main target to validate open source for creating professional quality 3d games, with Blender being used as creation and protyping tool and Crystal Space as engine and delivery platform.

All important stuff, because it's taking open source into new areas.