"For the next year at least, Blender is going to have 10 additional full-time paid developers. Some of those developers will be paid by the Blender Foundation or Blender Institute, sponsored with contributions from AMD, Aleph Objects, and the Nimble Collective.

More importantly, developers are being hired by production studios that use Blender, such as Tangent Animation and MAD Entertainment. These developers work on Blender for in-house productions, but their changes get submitted as patches for the version of Blender that we all get to use. This is a far more sustainable development model than sponsored grants and has been incredibly successful in other open source communities. It's only now starting to catch on in the realm of open source creative tools."