It probably can't be understated though how important it was that Ton, the original author was spearheading that whole thing. He would have had both an existing relationship with the investors, and enough clout with the community backers to envision a future for it... trust which was obviously well placed.
> On Sunday, October 13th, 2002, Blender was released under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence, the strictest possible open-source contract. Not only would Blender be free, but its source code would remain free, forever, to be used for any purpose whatsoever.
keep this in mind when you pick a software license.
