The Internet's Power of Collaboration

This column does not have a single author, but is submitted by a number of experts that contribute regularly to our news source.  Some are in Canada, some in the UK and one is in the far east

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The most underrated aspect of the World Wide Web is the surprising way people can collaborate from distant spots on the globe. 

Large projects can be accomplished by putting up on a server a set of open software that can be added to by people all over the world.  How does it work?

It usually starts slowly with an idea that has merit.  Suppose we want to do 3 dimensional modeling of high quality.  There are ways to do this.  You can buy some software at very  high price that is industrial strength or you can download Blender.

Blender started out as a project designed by a few people in Europe and now has blossomed out into a huge cooperative. The few soon found out that they could do more with many developers.

 

The Blender Foundation is an independent organization (a Dutch "stichting"), acting as a non-profit public benefit corporation, with the following goals

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27/07/2009 09:55 PM

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  • To establish services for active users and developers of Blender
  • To maintain and improve the current Blender product via a public accessible source code system under the GNU GPL license
  • To establish funding or revenue mechanisms that serve the foundation's goals and cover the foundation's expenses
  • To give the worldwide Internet community access to 3D technology in general, with Blender as a core

There are now thousands of developers of Blender and millions of downloads of it.  There is a group set up to accumulate the viable updates, test them and release them in an orderly manner.  All the documentation is online and the system, although, hard to learn for some, is very, very powerful.

You can take a copy of Blender for free, add to it and produce wonderful results or use it 'straight up' to do  many design tasks. 

It shows how developers and users from all over can work together without ever seeing each other, having a face to face meeting or talking on the phone.  No brick, no mortar, just bits and bytes traveling everywhere.

For a close look see www.blender.org

 
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