[Bf-committers] Blender 2.5 support team

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi all,

I proudly present to you the official Blender 2.5 support team!

Campbell Barton gets a year contract, and will fill Brecht's position.  
He will be working for Blender Institute, which might mean he has  
(current and future) Open Movie related assignments as well. For at  
least the first half the year his main focus will be stabilizing  
Blender and the Python API.

And! Thanks to additional sponsoring the Blender Foundation can also  
hire:

Nathan Letwory and Janne Karhu, each for 7 months half-time. They will  
be fully assigned to the job "get Blender out of beta", manage bug and  
patch trackers, support other developers, and get our documentation  
updated. They will officially start on September 1st.

Diego Borghetti is still working part time on tracker bugs as well,  
his contract has been extended to end of September. I will also check  
on doing a more visible donation (subscription?) system for hiring him  
or another additional official Blender developer for support topics.

Lastly: I'm planning to be also be available for development,  
especially after the Sintel premiere and Conference. My assignment  
will be to wrap up unfinished Blender 2.5 project topics, and ensure  
the UI works as pleasant and fast for experienced users as they were  
used to in the previous versions!

I think we have a great line-up this way, with team assignments that  
will have a clear benefit for everyone out there. This kind of work is  
the least Blender Foundation should organize.
A discussion how to extend this, like a pay-for-feature, still has to  
be done. My preference still is to organize it independently, as  
opportunity for new consultancy and integration business around  
blender.org.

Exciting times ahead!

Laters,

-Ton-

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Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation   ton at blender.org    www.blender.org
Blender Institute   Entrepotdok 57A  1018AD Amsterdam   The Netherlands