Last week at FOSDEM, I attended Tux With Shades, Linux In Hollywood, a keynote by Robin Rowe and Gabrielle Pantera. Robin is the admin of the CinePaint project, which is used for frame-by-frame retouching of film – part of a long chain of technology needed for making movie magic, all of which typically runs on Linux.
This isn’t news to me, because I live mere miles from where a lot of this stuff goes on and my partner is a color and lighting technical director at Sony Pictures Imageworks. I get daily exposure to how movies get made. Still, I doubt it’s common knowledge that large movie studios like Digital Domain, ILM, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Rhythm and Hues, and Dreamworks use Linux extensively on their desktops and in their renderfarms. The way I figure, that makes Hollywood one of open source’s largest commercial adopters. However, CinePaint seems to be the exception to the rule – mostly, in Hollywood’s production pipelines, the applications themselves are proprietary (and, in many cases, internally developed.)
I can imagine there are several reasons for this: brutal competition and secrecy are commonplace in the industry, timelines are inflexible, and buckets of cash are usually at stake. Those things might make a company think twice about being transparent with their technology. This has created a bit of a challenge for Robin, though. CinePaint needs help to reach its full potential…and, quite simply put, Hollywood has legitimate barriers to contributing directly.
It’s probably not too much of a stretch to assume that Hollywood is not alone in this. Accepting Linux as a platform without embracing the core values and transparent processes of open source is becoming the new norm. Is this a sign of success for Linux, a setback for open source, or both?