● Provide a neutral forum to coordinate cross-project efforts, establish best practices and share resources across the motion picture and broader media industries.
● Develop an open continuous integration (CI) and build infrastructure to enable reference builds from the community and alleviate issues caused by siloed development.
● Provide individuals and organizations with a clear path for participation and code contribution.
● Streamline development for build and runtime environments through the sharing of open source build configurations, scripts and recipes.
● Provide better, more consistent licensing through a shared licensing template.
According to the foundation, the launch of ASWF is “the result of a two-year investigation by the Academy’s Science and Technology Council into the use of Open Source Software (OSS) across the motion picture industry. The survey found that more than 80% of the industry uses open source software, particularly for animation and visual effects. However, this widespread use of OSS has also created challenges including siloed development, managing multiple versions of OSS libraries (“versionitis”) and varying governance and licensing models that need to be addressed in order to ensure a healthy open source ecosystem.”
If you’d like to know more and find out how to get involved, visit http://www.aswf.io/.
