I stumbled on Blender, a 3D design programme, after seeing a picture of a pool drenched in purple light on Instagram.

It appeared both real and fake, the water looking milky and the composition a little too pristine. The image was a 3D render—a two-dimensional image of a three-dimensional, digital model. Everything, from the multicoloured atmosphere to the reflections of the water, was not real. A fake tree next to fake water in a fake pool, representing a stylised and delightful version of reality.

I googled the name of the programme and found it was free to download. Not for 30 days, or a demo version only, but actually free. I clicked the download button without thinking. After finishing the installation, I was greeted by a grey cube in a three-dimensional eternity. “Nice!” I thought, clicking some random buttons. Nothing happened. After failing to navigate the programme for the next five minutes, I gave up, closed the window and moved on to something else. But the purple pool stuck around in the back of my brain.

Months later, I decided to try again. This time, I decided to follow a tutorial series to help me along. A quick search pointed to one place only: “The Donut Tutorial.” Created by a YouTuber called BlenderGuru, the tutorial teaches you how to create a photorealistic donut with Blender. Even sporting its own subreddit called r/BlenderDoughnuts, the series is the unofficial starting point for users around the world. 

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BlenderGuru starts off by introducing the grey cube I ran into earlier as the “default cube”. To move around it, you hold the middle mouse button, he says. I hadn’t thought of that during my first try. Progress has been made. He continues to explain the basics, chuckling when mentioning hotkeys since there are so many of them. 

We start the process by inserting a torus, the geometrical name for a donut-shape, and making it a bit more chunky. By the time we are ready to fashion some irregularities on the surface—the perfect donut doesn’t exist—my Blender starts behaving oddly. 

Having worked with design software before, I know it can be a pain to follow a tutorial where the teacher is using an older version of the programme, or when it is set to a different language. A button might not be in the same place, or say the same thing. Scrolling down to the comment section of the donut tutorial, I am hoping to find someone who has experienced the same issue. Someone who figured out a solution and was kind enough to share it.

To my surprise, I find a lot more than I am looking for. Not only has someone commented an easy fix, but others have also shared dozens of solutions to other problems. It seems like every contingency has been covered by someone who took their time to explain what might’ve happened and what to do now. Grateful people left hundreds of replies to these comments, from a casual “thanks” to “I LUV U”. Blender is complicated and teaching yourself can be frustrating. But here is a YouTube comment section of a freely available tutorial series where people are helping each other out. 

Besides practical advice, fellow pupils give words of encouragement and comic relief to those who are about to throw their computers out of the window. After finishing level one of the four-level series, one learner commented: “I feel prouder graduating from Level 1 to Level 2 than graduating from high school”. 

By the time I graduate level one, I feel euphoric, too. This donut is coming together nicely and it feels good to be here. The comments section proves to be an invaluable resource, contributing to the knowledge shared in the videos. Seeing the 12 million views from the first video in the series slowly decline to half a million by the end of the series, makes for a strange bonding experience with the faceless usernames on my screen.

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In the early 2000s, Blender’s creator, Ton Roosendaal, found himself in a bit of a pickle. Blender was largely owned by investors who had just decided to ditch it. Money stopped coming in, and Ton was forced to stop working on it because he didn’t own the rights. 

He started the Blender Foundation in May 2002 to embark on a mission. In an interview with BlenderGuru, he recounts approaching the investors, telling them: “Let’s be fair, Blender is not worth anything at the moment. It’s 2002, there’s a crisis, nobody invests any more. Nobody will buy this software without me,” before adding good-humouredly: “It is a totally un-understandable piece of shit with Dutch comments in the code and stuff.” He proposed to raise 100,000 euros to “Free Blender,” the name of his campaign. 

The investors accepted. Ton started a crowdfunding to buy out Blender long before the first crowdfunding platforms came along. Within seven weeks, the money was raised. Blender was free and to be free forever—the Blender Foundation would make the software open source. Blender was released under the most open of open-source licences. “Not only would Blender be free, but its source code would remain free, forever, to be used for any purpose whatsoever,” Blender’s website proclaims.

Many computer programmes are created by a company, like Microsoft or Google. The company sells their software, pays its employees and expenses, and makes a profit. Like a chef's secret ingredient, the programme’s code is inaccessible. This obscures how the programme works or, for example, how it uses your data. 

Open-source software does the exact opposite. By definition, it is freely available and may be redistributed or modified by anyone. There is no money to be made by selling it. Similarly, there are no employees to pay or marketing campaigns to unfurl. Instead, the software is created and maintained by its users—usually the people that needed it in the first place. An open-source programme that generates random numbers was probably created by people who desperately needed a random number generator. Examples of open-source software you might use are video player VLC Media Player, browser Mozilla Firefox and website builder WordPress.

The priority shifts from developing a product to generate a profit, in the case of a for-profit company, to producing a tool that works for those who use it. Without a CEO, the project’s goals and ownership become distributed among all the people involved. This means that there is no help desk to call when something malfunctions. But if you are savvy enough, you can fix the bug yourself without having to wait for a multinational company to take your complaint seriously. 

A great analogue example of open-source thinking is the three-point seatbelt. Like many inventions, its creators were quick to patent their design. But once it became clear how much safer the three-point seatbelt was compared to its predecessor, the two-point seatbelt, the patent was opened up. Every manufacturer was now allowed to produce a three-point seatbelt, saving countless lives in the process. 

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This sounds very nice and righteous, but the comment section under BlenderGuru’s donut tutorial surely isn’t the only friendly comment section in the universe. Besides, there is plenty of closed-source software with engaged user communities. Would my positive Blender experience have anything to do with the programme being of an open-source make?

Users of closed-source software may actively report bugs, or answer questions on forums, even receiving some form of appreciation from the company like extra or free access. But there is a limit to the extent that outsiders are allowed in. The main force moving a digital product forward is always a team of developers hired to do just that. Active user communities are assisting from the sidelines. 

Without staff on the payroll, open-source projects are entirely sustained by their communities—they go nowhere without a group of engaged individuals. Usually, these projects start small, with one or two developers having a crack at a simple prototype of whatever tool they imagined. If they succeed, a small community of people might start getting involved to further the process. Suddenly, there are more people contributing their brain power, skills, and time to a project they believe is worth their time. 

When the Blender community was struggling with a specific feature, Ton says help appeared out of the blue. “That was mainly thanks to one developer. That’s a guy from Belgium, Benoît. And he suddenly started fixing things every day,” he explains in the BlenderGuru interview. The developer wanted to use Blender to create a little video game with his son and started fixing bugs left and right while they were at it. Ton adds: “But those things are hard to organise. He’s a top software engineer. I wouldn’t have been able to afford him.” It can be difficult to steer a community of free agents, explains Ton, continuing: “The community doesn’t really listen to what you tell them to do. They have their own ideas!” The only way to move forward is by working together and helping each other out.

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I was met by similar insights when I asked around on Reddit. “Because Blender is open source,” says one user, “So it's built from the ground up with the spirit of fostering a community of artists and developers.” Another Redditor chimes in, saying that there is “no call line” when things go wrong: “You will rely on the help of other users/volunteers. As your skills grow, you start feeling like giving something back.” When it comes to learning how to use Blender, someone explains that Blender’s outsider position in the industry means it is not often used in educational institutions. “So everyone who has learned Blender, has done so online, with the help from others.”

However, Blender’s community did receive a bit of help from Ton himself. He was wary that Blender would follow the path of many other open-source projects in becoming too techy and losing touch with its casual and artistic users. Developers do most of the legwork when it comes to open-source projects, which means that they have the upper hand when deciding the software’s direction. So, Ton founded the Blender Institute in 2007 to show Blender’s potential to a wider audience by making animated short films and educational materials. 

“I don’t think beautiful code or well-designed software is interesting. What I’m interested in is working software,” Ton says. By getting artists on board, he was able to prove that Blender wasn’t just another cool open-source project, but a usable programme that could compete with the bigwigs in 3D.

Making a project open-source is no sure-fire way to fix the wrongs of big tech, but Blender shows that communities that care can have an exciting impact on the tech landscape. Without a customer service number to call, users and learners turn to each other to improve the project and teach each other the ropes. A lack of pay is easily forgiven by those who take pride in being involved and have a say in where things are going. 

More importantly, you don’t need to be a developer to add something of value. I am certain that I will never contribute a meaningful line of code to Blender. But I might write an article about a programme that made me think differently about the internet.