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Comment by ronsor | Hacker News Reader

The other large studios that compete with them (e.g. Pixar) already have their own just-as-good renderers.

Even still, what's the incentive to open-source? So the community can bootstrap a better solution than Pixar?

By showing they care about open source, there's a chance they'll attract developers and animators who care about that.

Seems targeted at CentOS7, support for which is sunset in little over a year. Smells a bit like abandonware, hoping for adoption by unpaid volunteers.

Still, dumping it into FOSS community is not the worst graveyard for commercial software...

They just released a feature film with this renderer, grossing $462 million and widely praised for its animation.

Large studios don't update so regularly vs e.g. a startup. They have very specific setups, which is in fact a large part of why it took them so long to release moonray vs when they said they would last year. And they are moving to Rocky Linux soon IIRC.

>dumping it into FOSS community

They are not "dumping" anything. Would it have hurt to look into the facts before commenting?

It's not a big deal to take something built for CentOS7 and port to a later Red Hat (or clone) distro. It appears that they released a setup for what they use, which is CentOS7.

Major animated movies take years to develop, and they don’t like to change the build process during. I used to cover a major animation studio for a major Linux vendor and they did in fact use very old shit.

re: CentOS7, the VFX Reference Platform (https://vfxplatform.com/) is probably relevant here. Their latest Linux Platform Recommendations report from August last year already covers migrations off of CentOS 7 / RHEL7 before the end of maintenance in 2024

Studios don't want to upgrade fast (e.g. they're not interested in running Debian unstable or CentOS's streaming updates thing)... they're interested in stability for hundreds of artists' workstations.

Getting commercial Linux apps like Maya, Houdini, Nuke, etc. working well at scale is hard enough without the underlying OS changing all the time.

Or create a pipeline of young talent who can come from university already trained on their system.

Why not?

The tool may be good, but the output visuals are only as good as the artists that use said tools. They can open source the tools all they want and try to hire all the talent that can use it. :)

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