Hollywood Goes Open Source: Academy Teams Up With Linux Foundation To Launch Academy Software Foundation (variety.com) 49
Hollywood now has its very own open source organization: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has teamed up with the Linux Foundation to launch the Academy Software Foundation, which is dedicated to advance the use of open source in film making and beyond. From a report: The association's founding members include Animal Logic, Autodesk, Blue Sky Studios, Cisco, DNEG, DreamWorks, Epic Games, Foundry, Google Cloud, Intel, SideFX, Walt Disney Studios and Weta Digital. Together, they want to promote open source, help studios and others in Hollywood with open source licensing issues and manage open source projects under the helm of the Software Foundation. The cooperation between the Academy and the Linux Foundation began a little over two years ago, when the Academy's Science and Technology Council began to look into Hollywood's use of open source software. "It's the culmination of a couple of years of work," said Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) head Rob Bredlow in an interview with Variety this week.
One of the findings of that investigation: Almost everyone in Hollywood is using open source software in one way or another. An internal survey found that 80 percent of all companies were using open source. "It's a really big component of the motion picture industry," Bredlow said. Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin argued that this kind of cooperation could be transformative for Hollywood. "I've seen this movie before in other industries," he punned, explaining that automotive companies had seen huge benefits from working together on open source projects.
One of the findings of that investigation: Almost everyone in Hollywood is using open source software in one way or another. An internal survey found that 80 percent of all companies were using open source. "It's a really big component of the motion picture industry," Bredlow said. Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin argued that this kind of cooperation could be transformative for Hollywood. "I've seen this movie before in other industries," he punned, explaining that automotive companies had seen huge benefits from working together on open source projects.
Smart Move (Score:1)
Re:Smart Move (Score:4, Interesting)
I disagree.
Working together often makes things better, but without opposing forces things and new ideas things tend to stagnate.
An open-minded 90% working together with a very cunning 10% doing something different makes for something better.
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Open source does eliminate competition. Open source ensures that the best ideas win out regardless of the origin of the idea.
Hollywood forked Gimp long ago (Score:5, Informative)
ILM (George Lucas), Pixar, and others have been using Gimp for decades. They created a fork specifically for movies called FilmGimp. It was later renamed CinePaint.
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IIRC, the main issue driving FilmGimp/CinePaint was lack of 16 bit per color precision. When Gimp finally got that merged (and a bunch of other precisions up to 32 bit float per color) there was no longer a need to continue developing CinePaint.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Tools vs. entertainment products (Score:2)
There's a difference between works used as tools and works used as mass entertainment. The featured article acknowledges a deep divide between movie studios and the free software community over digital restrictions management. But even if a studio puts DRM on its entertainment products, that need not extend to putting DRM on tools.
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There's a difference between works used as tools and works used as mass entertainment.
Yeah, tools have use and are easier to trick their creators into doing it for free.
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Disney is involved - this really surprises me considering their Apple ties.
Don't forget about "obsessed with using freely accessible public-domain content while lobbying anyone in a political office they can to make sure their stuff never become freely accessible public-domain content".
Apple has been treading water for years with Macs (Score:2)
Their hardware simply isnt up to the job any more, Cook has not only dropped the ball, he's kicked it out of the stadium. So its no surprise studios are moving over to commodity PCs. I'm guessing they already have a lot of unix based tools and apps so moving to Windows would be a royal PITA (not to mention the security issues) making Linux the obvious alternative.
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That was happening 20 years ago. Back then, startup VFX companies were building their own render farms out of commodity PC's and 3Dmax. They didn't care about the failure rate vs. reliability against a high-end workstation. A cluster of five commodity PC's matched the reliability/performance of one workstation/server. Renderfarm management software took care of the rest such as making use of idle PC's.
There are many open source libraries like OpenEXR (for high dynamic range images). It saves an great deal o
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Apple (Score:3)
Why does it surprise you given their Apple ties?
https://opensource.apple.com/ [apple.com]
Here's a bunch of source code they release, including in-house stuff they release as open source.
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Linux doesn't just own the render farms. many or most of the workstations are Linux too. A lot of Maya. Why? More stable, more throughput.
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Glad to see an industry obsessed about preventing people making free copies of their shit is using software that is freely copied...
Dude, quit your whining, we finally get to download and use all the leet haxor apps from the movies. Want to take over CCTV ala Mission Impossible? Hollywood already has that app. Want to drain foreign bank account without being traced? Hollywood's got you, bro. Need to really enhance that photo, maybe rotate it around a corner? Hollywood, baby!
It's finally here! (Score:1)
It's to destroy the CG industry (Score:3)
Re: Open Source Video Editing? (Score:2)
I've done some decent editing with Kdenlive.
https://kdenlive.org/en/ [kdenlive.org]
When looking around myself, it came highly recommended.
Need: Covenenant Not To Sue (Score:1)
Sure, they're comfortable cozying up to "open source" (note: they don't say FREE and open source software, or FOSS), but that's everyone in the world who uses LAMP and other FOSS projects -- whether they realize it or not.
What would be meaningful and newsworthy is if the Academy (and Hollywood in general including the MPAA) added a covenant not to use the people who contribute to FOSS and to help FOSS prosper, grow, and be better funded by sponsors.
Ehud Gavron
Tucson AZ
80% use opensource (Score:2)
An internal survey found that 80 percent of all companies were using open source
If the actual question is about having a least one opensource application in their systems, then the answer is probably 100%, with the remaining 20% is probably just not being aware