Comment Re:You just don't get it. (Score 5, Informative) 193
furiousgeorge wrote:
(FYI - ILM considers OpenEXR to be a big failure. They've gotten pretty much zero contributions back from anybody. It's only take take take. It still helps ILM because they're getting most other packages to implement the format so they can make their pipeline more unified, but whether that was more or less effort that open sourcing the package in the first place is subject to debate).
Speak for yourself, it is simply not true that ILM considers OpenEXR to be a failure of any kind. We have received contributions from the open source community. The initial version of OpenEXR didn't support Win32, for example, yet 3 days after we released it, there was a port to Win32 which we later incorporated into the main code base.
Billy Biggs has written a useful collection of OpenEXR tools and made them available as open source.
Cinepaint supports the format and there's at least one other open source project which, last I talked to them, is rewriting its entire image processing pipeline to deal with floating-point pixels, inspired in part by OpenEXR.
Pixar donated code for a new compressor to the project and made it available under our modified BSD-like license.
I will admit that I would have liked to see more VFX houses following Pixar's lead and making contributions, esp. in the form of plugins for various commercial packages, but overall I'm very happy with the support we've gotten from the community in general. Many commercial packages support the format now, or will in their next version, so that's basically a moot point now, anyway.
OpenEXR's success as an open source project isn't judged solely on the number of contributions made, either; it's really all about its acceptance in the industry, and it's doing pretty well in that category. There were several goals in releasing OpenEXR as open source. The main one, from ILM's perspective, was to get support from commercial packages so we didn't have to write and maintain our own plugins. That's already happening, and that alone will save more developer time in the long run than it took to package OpenEXR as an open source project.
Another positive, yet unforseen, outcome that's shaping up is interest in using OpenEXR as an exchange format between post houses. This is something that ILM is currently working on, with valuable input from the community. There was a BOF covering this topic at SIGGRAPH; the initial proposal can be found here. In today's climate of multiple post houses working simultaneously on movie productions, exchanging files and managing color information between houses is a big PITA. There's a lot of excitement about using OpenEXR for this and, in the process, preserving HDR data, which is not possible with DPX (not to the extent that it is with OpenEXR, anyway). Something like this wouldn't have been possible if we hadn't open-sourced OpenEXR.
So, in summary, it's simply not true to say that ILM considers OpenEXR to be a "big failure." We regard it as a pretty big success.
-dwh-
(FYI - ILM considers OpenEXR to be a big failure. They've gotten pretty much zero contributions back from anybody. It's only take take take. It still helps ILM because they're getting most other packages to implement the format so they can make their pipeline more unified, but whether that was more or less effort that open sourcing the package in the first place is subject to debate).
Speak for yourself, it is simply not true that ILM considers OpenEXR to be a failure of any kind. We have received contributions from the open source community. The initial version of OpenEXR didn't support Win32, for example, yet 3 days after we released it, there was a port to Win32 which we later incorporated into the main code base.
Billy Biggs has written a useful collection of OpenEXR tools and made them available as open source.
Cinepaint supports the format and there's at least one other open source project which, last I talked to them, is rewriting its entire image processing pipeline to deal with floating-point pixels, inspired in part by OpenEXR.
Pixar donated code for a new compressor to the project and made it available under our modified BSD-like license.
I will admit that I would have liked to see more VFX houses following Pixar's lead and making contributions, esp. in the form of plugins for various commercial packages, but overall I'm very happy with the support we've gotten from the community in general. Many commercial packages support the format now, or will in their next version, so that's basically a moot point now, anyway.
OpenEXR's success as an open source project isn't judged solely on the number of contributions made, either; it's really all about its acceptance in the industry, and it's doing pretty well in that category. There were several goals in releasing OpenEXR as open source. The main one, from ILM's perspective, was to get support from commercial packages so we didn't have to write and maintain our own plugins. That's already happening, and that alone will save more developer time in the long run than it took to package OpenEXR as an open source project.
Another positive, yet unforseen, outcome that's shaping up is interest in using OpenEXR as an exchange format between post houses. This is something that ILM is currently working on, with valuable input from the community. There was a BOF covering this topic at SIGGRAPH; the initial proposal can be found here. In today's climate of multiple post houses working simultaneously on movie productions, exchanging files and managing color information between houses is a big PITA. There's a lot of excitement about using OpenEXR for this and, in the process, preserving HDR data, which is not possible with DPX (not to the extent that it is with OpenEXR, anyway). Something like this wouldn't have been possible if we hadn't open-sourced OpenEXR.
So, in summary, it's simply not true to say that ILM considers OpenEXR to be a "big failure." We regard it as a pretty big success.
-dwh-
