ASWF: the Open Source Foundation Run By the Folks Who Give Out Oscars (theregister.com) 18
This week's Ubuntu Summit 2024 was attended by Lproven (Slashdot reader #6,030). He's also a FOSS correspondent for the Register, where he's filed this report:
One of the first full-length sessions was presented by David Morin, executive director of the Academy Software Foundation, introducing his organization in a talk about Open Source Software for Motion Pictures. Morin linked to the Visual Effects Society's VFX/Animation Studio Workstation Linux Report, highlighting the market share pie-chart, showing Rocky Linux 9 with at some 58 percent and the RHELatives in general at 90 percent of the market. Ubuntu 22 and 24 — the report's nomenclature, not this vulture's — got just 10.5 percent. We certainly didn't expect to see that at an Ubuntu event, with the latest two versions of Rocky Linux taking 80 percent of the studio workstation market...
What also struck us over the next three quarters of an hour is that Linux and open source in general seem to be huge components of the movie special effects industry — to an extent that we had not previously realized.
There's a "sizzle reel" showing examples of how major motion pictures used OpenColorIO, an open-source production tool for syncing color representations originally developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks. That tool is hosted by a collaboration between the Linux Foundation with the Science and Technology Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the "Academy" of the Academy Awards). The collaboration — which goes by the name of the Academy Software Foundation — hosts 14 different projects The ASWF hasn't been around all that long — it was only founded in 2018. Despite the impact of the COVID pandemic, by 2022 it had achieved enough to fill a 45-page history called Open Source in Entertainment [PDF]. Morin told the crowd that it runs events, provides project marketing and infrastructure, as well as funding, training and education, and legal assistance. It tries to facilitate industry standards and does open source evangelism in the industry. An impressive list of members — with 17 Premier companies, 16 General ones, and another half a dozen Associate members — shows where some of the money comes from. It's a big list of big names. [Adobe, AMD, AWS, Autodesk...]
The presentation started with OpenVBD, a C++ library developed and donated by Dreamworks for working with three-dimensional voxel-based shapes. (In 2020 they created this sizzle reel, but this year they've unveiled a theme song.) Also featured was OpenEXR, originally developed at Industrial Light and Magic and sourced in 1999. (The article calls it "a specification and reference implementation of the EXR file format — a losslessly compressed image storage format for moving images at the highest possible dynamic range.")
"For an organization that is not one of the better-known ones in the FOSS space, we came away with the impression that the ASWF is busy," the article concludes. (Besides running Open Source Days and ASWF Dev Days, it also hosts several working groups like the Language Interop Project works on Rust bindings and the Continuous Integration Working Group on CI tools, There's generally very little of the old razzle-dazzle in the Linux world, but with the demise of SGI as the primary maker of graphics workstations — its brand now absorbed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise — the visual effects industry moved to Linux and it's doing amazing things with it. And Kubernetes wasn't even mentioned once.
What also struck us over the next three quarters of an hour is that Linux and open source in general seem to be huge components of the movie special effects industry — to an extent that we had not previously realized.
There's a "sizzle reel" showing examples of how major motion pictures used OpenColorIO, an open-source production tool for syncing color representations originally developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks. That tool is hosted by a collaboration between the Linux Foundation with the Science and Technology Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the "Academy" of the Academy Awards). The collaboration — which goes by the name of the Academy Software Foundation — hosts 14 different projects The ASWF hasn't been around all that long — it was only founded in 2018. Despite the impact of the COVID pandemic, by 2022 it had achieved enough to fill a 45-page history called Open Source in Entertainment [PDF]. Morin told the crowd that it runs events, provides project marketing and infrastructure, as well as funding, training and education, and legal assistance. It tries to facilitate industry standards and does open source evangelism in the industry. An impressive list of members — with 17 Premier companies, 16 General ones, and another half a dozen Associate members — shows where some of the money comes from. It's a big list of big names. [Adobe, AMD, AWS, Autodesk...]
The presentation started with OpenVBD, a C++ library developed and donated by Dreamworks for working with three-dimensional voxel-based shapes. (In 2020 they created this sizzle reel, but this year they've unveiled a theme song.) Also featured was OpenEXR, originally developed at Industrial Light and Magic and sourced in 1999. (The article calls it "a specification and reference implementation of the EXR file format — a losslessly compressed image storage format for moving images at the highest possible dynamic range.")
"For an organization that is not one of the better-known ones in the FOSS space, we came away with the impression that the ASWF is busy," the article concludes. (Besides running Open Source Days and ASWF Dev Days, it also hosts several working groups like the Language Interop Project works on Rust bindings and the Continuous Integration Working Group on CI tools, There's generally very little of the old razzle-dazzle in the Linux world, but with the demise of SGI as the primary maker of graphics workstations — its brand now absorbed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise — the visual effects industry moved to Linux and it's doing amazing things with it. And Kubernetes wasn't even mentioned once.
Thats a good thing (Score:3)
Especially if we can make sure that it stays not only Open Source, but also GPL.
It would set an example for the worlds companies that code should be shared, not patented, as it fosters new and faster development, gives small companies and individuals a standing chance, and still servers as a viable business model as it can be freely available to any company or individual and provide jobs for those who service it either by offering expertise or support.
Re: (Score:2)
[Author here]
Why GPL in particular?
Re: (Score:3)
The most popular Open Source licenses (Apache and MIT) are permissive in that they only require attribution and retention of copyright. The GPL brought requiring provision of source to the table, it is the reason why the GPL exists at all given that Open Source licenses existed when it was created.
The poster child for why is the success of Linux over the *BSDs which according not only to Linus [datacenterknowledge.com], but also somewhat ironically given the current situation to Redhat [redhat.com].
Major contributors to Linux have explicitly tol
Re: (Score:3)
The GPL's killer feature IMHO is that it attracts (many) developers with the promise that the open source code they write will never be allowed to be integrated by someone into a closed-source project. This might be the reason why Linux was able to amass a critical mass of developers before the BSDs, let alone Minix.
I noticed that you wrote essentially the same thing, but I thought that it needed to be emphasized.
I read that quickly as AMWF (Score:2)
I guess I need glasses.
What a shame (Score:3)
I thought that the greedy folks at MPAA would at least show the common decency to use the official IBM/Redhat RHEL... instead of handicapped copycats like Rocky. Money has clouded these peoples' minds.
Re: (Score:1)
I thought that the greedy folks at MPAA would at least show the common decency to use the official IBM/Redhat RHEL
Feeling bad for IBM is the dumbest possible take, especially now that Redhate's contract terms are a direct attack on the GPL.
and so it begins (Score:1)
IBM PR gets modpoints now? What a fucking shit show of worship of the enemies of open source and Free Software this site has become.
Let's do another one (Score:2)
Redhat, a fully-owned subsidiary of IBM, is now using a license saying that if you exercise your legal rights to software which they are distributing to you under those programs' respective licenses, they will terminate your contract with them.
This is a deliberate assault on the GPL which intentionally opposes both its meaning and its intent, and there are moderators on Slashdot who are here to protect and support that assault.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I admit, I'm not ideally deft every time.
Re: What a shame (Score:2)
I won't comment IBM, but Redhat hardly deserve the hate. Their terms are 100% compliant with the GPL, and their contributions to the GNU/Linux ecosystem and open source
as a whole have been huge.
Re: (Score:2)
I won't comment IBM, but Redhat hardly deserve the hate. Their terms are 100% compliant with the GPL
Remember when Tivo made a deliberate end-run around the purpose of the GPL and we got a new GPL as a result of their fuckery? Redhate is now doing very much the same thing, they are deliberately compromising the spirit of the GPL with their supplemental license which directly contradicts it.
Further, Redhat is owned by IBM, which means they are PART OF IBM, you cannot speak of them separately. When you say "Redhat" you are actually saying "IBM's subsidiary, Redhat" whether you know it or not. And if you don'
Re: (Score:2)
right up until centos got cancelled. VFX studios run on such a small margin that they could not afford the licenses. I could not believe the things I've seen...
Semi-OT, I was just thinking of this (Score:3)
with the demise of SGI as the primary maker of graphics workstations â" its brand now absorbed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise
HP, the #2 place where cool tech goes to die after IBM.
But actually ;) we all have the cool tech on our Linux machines now, the average of which is an absolute monster which will crush any single-machine system SGI ever made. We all have OpenGL, we all have GLX, we all have dedicated 3d hardware (even if it's integrated into the CPU package) which can do realtime 3d graphics with hardware accelerated transparency, lighting, deformation, etc etc. We all have a Unixlike (which has come to in fact define Unix, which now takes its cues from Linux instead of the other way around) and thankfully the security is much better than it ever was with IRIX.
We truly live in the future... From a Unix perspective.
Did anyone not know this? (Score:2, Informative)
Unaware? How could you be unaware? The use of open source systems to create special effects has been well documented back to Titanic's wave effects at least.
reference platform is rhel (Score:2)
see https://vfxplatform.com/ [vfxplatform.com]. If Ubuntu wants to be part of the game, they gonna have to convince the business and provide a workable solution to this.
Re: (Score:2)
The link you provided says nothing about RHEL being "the reference platform". In particular, I'm pretty sure that I can met all their requirements with Debian. It will require some hunting and fiddling with packages, but it can be done. For these who have no time and desire to fiddle, RHEL might indeed be the way.