Blender and Free/Open Software

I received the following response from Ton (author of Blender) about making it open software. The question for him, is how can he keep his company going while releasing the software. The question for me is how many people would be willing to commit to work on this project, so that Blender is improved and has more features added to it than NeoGeo could do by itself. This might be an opportunity a la Openscape. Any takers?

Ton's letter follows:

Our first concern is getting the free Unices working. Blender is a very complex program, mainly written by 1 person (myself), quite chaotic and completely undocumented. I'm not convinced this source code will survive if released.

What we do have is a plugin and library system. These will be released first. Maybe commercial, but for a very reasonable price.

We are looking for a method to keep it all freeware, and using the spin-off to keep our company running.