On August 10, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences—the same organization responsible for the Academy Awards (also known as the Oscars), not exactly an industry that’s renowned for its openness—teamed up with the Linux Foundation to form the Academy Software Foundation(ASWF). The purpose of this organization is “to increase the quality and quantity of contributions to the content creation industry’s open source software base.” That’s right; the film industry has put together an organization in support of open source software.
According to a presentation shared during this year’s SIGGRAPH conference, code repositories will be hosted on GitHub, use Jenkins and Nexus Repository Manager for automation and continuous integration, and have much clearer processes for people to submit bug reports and pull requests. Even more important, any project that’s accepted for inclusion in the ASWF will still maintain its autonomy when it comes to development. Core developers still decide what patches to include and even what license to release under, so long as it’s OSI-approved.
The foundation hasn’t yet announced any official projects under its management, but it’s still early days. Prime candidates to start, though, look to be the libraries that were born from the industry. I would expect projects like OpenEXR, OpenVDB, and OpenColorIO to be first in line.
Read more at OpenSource.com
