An awful lot of FOSS should thank the Academy

Ubuntu Summit 2024 One of the things we didn't expect to see at this year's Ubuntu get-together was a chart showing Rocky Linux's dominance. Another was demos of whizz-bang special movie effects with open source componentry at their heart.

The Ubuntu Summit 2024 was in the Hague this year, and the Reg FOSS desk was invited along. 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.

It struck us in several different ways. One was that right at the start, Morin linked to the Visual Effects Society's Studio Workstation 2024 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, but AlmaLinux just under 12 percent, it also rather confirms our suspicions about those projects' relative success - but that's not important right now.)

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. Given the many excruciatingly dull talks about containers and container management tools we've had to sit through in recent years, we also very much enjoyed the succession of "sizzle reels" that Morin presented. They're undeniably impressive and worth watching for a glimpse of the glamorous side of Linux in industry.

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The Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) is a collaborative project run by the Science and Technology Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) and the Linux Foundation. AMPAS is the "Academy" of the Academy Awards - or the Oscars as they're better known - and it sponsors numerous FOSS projects. Morin proceeded to run through the 14 different projects it hosts - in addition to events, online forums and more.

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.

What followed was the list of projects it runs, which he encouraged the audience "to go dig into" if he was boring.

He started with Open VBD, a C++ library for working with spare volumetric data - shapes made of voxels, rather than flat images made up of pixels. This was developed at and donated by Dreamworks. Rather than a sizzle reel, this has a theme song - really underlining for us the difference between the movie industry and the one around web servers.

Next was OpenColorIO, originally developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks. This syncs color representations between different applications and platforms.

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Then came OpenEXR. Originally developed at Industrial Light and Magic and made open source way back in 1999, OpenEXR is 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.

Next on screen was OpenCue, a FOSS render manager, which can break down complex rendering jobs into multiple individual tasks. The demo video shows how many layers are involved in many special-effects scenes - and each of those layers can be handled separately. Like OpenColorIO, OpenCue was originally developed at ImageWorks, and it's been used in so many films that even this somewhat cinema-averse vulture has a few favorites in there. We may have to try to add The Meg to this list, as Morin mentioned it as one of his personal favorites, along with Jumanji and the excellent Spiderman across the Spiderverse.

Open shading language is a language for programmable shading in advanced renderers, created at Imageworks but now BSD-licensed. It can be used with multiple rendering tools, some of which are big enough names that even the Reg FOSS desk has heard of them - such as Renderman and Blender.

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Some of the ASWF projects are less glamorous, behind-the-scenes software for coordinating software and resources.

MaterialX is an open standard for representing rich material and look-development content in computer graphics - such as those in its free library. (Think of textures, as in video gaming, but considerably more complex.) Like OpenEXR, it came from ILM. Rez is a cross-platform package management tool that handles entire collections, creating repositories and standalone environments for their use. Since this project's main URL points to its documentation rather the the code itself, we suspect it is not a trivial system.

RawToACES is a relatively simple tool, which can convert digital camera RAW files into ACES format. OpenFX is a standard for creating visual effects plugins. OpenAssetIO is an open standard for assets-management systems. OpenImageIO is a library for reading, writing and manipulating image files in a wide variety of image formats. And OpenTimelineIO, which came from Pixar, is an API, an interchange format, and a set of plugins for managing Edit Decision Lists, which store reel and timecode data for stitching together pieces of video from multiple different sources into one.

DPEL is the Digital Production Example Library, which contains a wide range of free-of-charge digital assets for experimenting and learning modern feature-film computer graphics, visual effects and animation. One example is the short film Spanner by FuzzyPixel, just two minutes 20 seconds long. The library contains the digital assets required to recreate and animate the film's main character Noa.

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The OpenReviewInitiative came about as a direct result of COVID. As Morin put it:

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. It also hosts four working groups: the Language Interop Project works on Rust bindings, the Continuous Integration Working Group on CI tools, the Diversity & Inclusion Working Group on composition of the people in the industry, and the Universal Scene Description Working Group on the use of the Universal Scene Description language, which came out of Pixar and the Register looked at in 2021. It also ran two series of events in 2024: Open Source Days and ASWF Dev Days.

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.