Background

The Academy Software Foundation (ASWF), a project hosted by The Linux Foundation, provides a neutral forum for open source software developers in the motion picture and broader media industries to share resources and collaborate on image creation, visual effects, animation, and sound technologies. 

It was created in 2018 after the conclusion of an investigation by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) Science and Technology Council holding an 18-month investigation on the state of open source in the industry. This aligned with the need for a vendor-neutral foundation to provide a sustainable home for open source projects that are key to the growth of the industry.

Identifying the need for exemplar assets for community use

As of August 2021, The Academy Software Foundation provides a home for Open Shading Language, OpenColorIO, OpenCue, OpenEXR, OpenTimelineIO, OpenVDB, and MaterialX.

As these projects have progressed in development, there was a need identified to have production-grade digital assets (e.g.,3D scene data, images, image sequences, volumetric data, animation rigs, edit decision lists) available for use in development and testing environments to ensure these projects can scale to the demands of the movie and content creation processes. 

Furthermore, the ASWF identified an additional need to have production-grade assets for general research and learning purposes. 

The ASWF identified two objectives to address these requirements:

Provide a vendor-neutral home for both homing the assets and being a curator for exemplar assets that would align with the industry needs.Create a licensing framework striking a balance between the needs in research, learning, and open source development, with the intellectual property concerns of production-grade assets (as they often come from real productions).

An open community comes together

There was some precedent in the industry, with the 2018 release of the Moana Island Scene by Disney Animation. This sparked several discussions in the industry on how to have a larger set of similar assets available for community use leading to the creation of an Asset Repository Working Group at the Academy Software Foundation in 2020.

The culmination of this working group came in July 2021, with the transition of the working group to a formal project that will establish the infrastructure and governance of the Assets Repository. The intention is for the project to function and work like any other open source project, with full transparency and community participation, to identify and curate exemplar assets. 

At the same time, the legal counsel across Academy Software Foundation members came together to align on the ASWF Digital Assets License, which was created in the spirit of licenses used previously in the industry and designed to specifically ensure these assets can be used for education, learning, research, and open source development. The ASWF Digital Assets License helped create a bridge between producers and consumers of these assets, establishing standardized terms to enable collaboration and the re-use of content in an industry where it had previously been limited.

As of August 2021, there is interest from multiple organizations in contributing assets to this repository as it takes form over the next few months.

Conclusion

The Linux Foundation has been the home for vendor-neutral collaboration in both horizontal technology spaces and vertical markets such as automotive, networking, energy, and here motion pictures. In supporting over 750 open source projects, we are starting to see more and more efforts such as these where the collaboration outside of traditional software development and into educational materials, community development, and standards. The Assets Repository project at the Academy Software Foundation is a great example of the unique collaboration opportunities that open source brings and are driven by our open communities.

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Wind River also advances its commitment to the open source ecosystem by joining the project as a Silver Member

SAN FRANCISCO, September 13, 2021 – On the heels of its 5th anniversary and inaugural Developer Summit, the Zephyr Project today announces a major milestone with more than 1,000 contributors and 55,000 commits. Zephyr, an open source project at the Linux Foundation that builds a safe, secure and flexible real-time operating system (RTOS) for resource-constrained devices, also welcomes Antmicro as a Platinum member and Wind River as a Silver member.

Zephyr RTOS unites companies, developers and end users around the world to ensure balanced collaboration and feedback to evolve and meet the needs of its community. This innovative relationship among stakeholders advances the Zephyr Project’s support of new hardware, developer tools, sensors, and drivers, while maximizing the functionality of devices that run applications developed using the Zephyr OS.

“The number of contributors to an open source project is one of the best measures of its relevance to the open source community,” said Barna Ibrahim, Chair of the Zephyr Project Marketing Group and Strategic Partner Development Lead at Google. “Today’s announcement represents one more step in our open source journey and increased role in the advocacy, use and contribution across the Zephyr ecosystem. Ultimately, this strong ecosystem will help build secure and safe products across the globe.”

Evidence that momentum will continue growing for the project include:

The 1000th contributor – meet Embla Flatlandsmo and learn more about what and why she contributed to the project in this blog and video.Almost 700 people registered for the first-ever Zephyr Developer Summit in June. The event consisted of 5 mini-conferences, 28 sessions and 51 speakers who presented technical content, best practices, real-world use cases and more. Videos are available on the Zephyr Project Youtube Channel.Zephyr is able to automatically generate an Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) during builds with the 2.6 release, so support for ISO/IEC 5962:2021 SBOMs is already included in the second Long Term Support (LTS) release this fall.It is one of the few open source projects that has a CVE Numbering Authority(CNA) and has an active Project Security Incident Response Team(PSIRT) that manages responsible disclosure of vulnerabilities to product makers. Product creators using Zephyr can sign up for free to be notified of vulnerabilities.  Golioth, a recent new member and Zephyr tool provider, received $2.5 million in seed funding and beta testing, which was all based on the RTOS.Seamless integration with Renode (Antmicro’s simulation framework for complex IoT systems), Nanopb (Protocol buffers for embedded systems),  TensorFlow Lite Micro (software library for embedded machine learning) and others.Antmicro released the Open Source M.2 IoT Smart Module with edge ML capabilities based on EdgeTPU and Zephyr RTOS running on Nordic nrf52840 to enable fully open hardware IoT gateways.

Commitment to Zephyr

Today, the Zephyr Project announces that long-time member Antmicro has doubled down on its commitment by upgrading its membership to Platinum. Peter Gielda, CEO of Antmicro, will join the Zephyr Governing Board.

Additionally, Wind River joined the project as a Silver member. Other project member companies include Adafruit, AVSystem, BayLibre, Eclipse Foundation, Facebook, Fiware, Foundries.io, Golioth, Google, Intel, Laird Connectivity, Linaro, Memfault, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP, Oticon, Parasoft, Pat-Eta Electronics, RISC-V, SiFive, Synopsys and teenage engineering, among others.

“We are delighted to welcome Peter Gielda to the Governing Board,” said Joel Stapleton, Chair of the Zephyr Project Governing Board and Principal Engineering Manager at Nordic Semiconductor. “Antmicro has already contributed so much to Zephyr with board support, demos and documentation. We look forward to working more closely with them and strengthening our community.”

“An active member of the project since its early days, Antmicro has been pioneering the use of Zephyr in several fields, including FPGAs and the RISC-V architecture, in both hard and soft implementations,“ said Peter Gielda, CEO at Antmicro and now Member of the Zephyr Project Governing Board. “Building on top of our work combining TensorFlow Lite Micro, Zephyr and Renode for machine learning development we join our customers and partners Google, Intel, NXP and Nordic Semiconductor in a leadership position in Zephyr to strengthen the vendor-neutral RTOS option for the open source hardware, software and AI solutions that we develop.”

“As we move towards an intelligent systems future, it will become increasingly important to collect and process data at the intelligent edge in real time,” said Amar Parmar, Senior Director, Solution Partners at Wind River. “For resource-constrained devices, Zephyr can be at the heart of where this data originates. Zephyr Project has fostered a vibrant and growing community addressing the technical requirements to deploy a new generation of devices, aligned with modern development practices and tooling. As an original contributor to the code base and an active member of the community, we look forward to continued collaboration.”

To learn more about Zephyr RTOS, visit the Zephyr website and blog.

About the Zephyr Project

The Zephyr Project is an open source, scalable real-time operating system (RTOS) supporting multiple hardware architectures. To learn more, please visit www.zephyrproject.org.

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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