ASWF is the open source foundation run by the folks who give out Oscars, and you’ve probably seen the results
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.
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].
