ASWF TAC Meeting - July 15, 2020

Video Conference Link

Voting member attendance

Other Attendees

John Mertic, Linux Foundation
Emily Olin, Linux Foundation
JT Nelson, Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Ashley Whetter, Python 3 Working Group / DNeg
Nick Porcino, Pixar
Greg Denton, Microsoft Azure
Andrew Grimberg, Linux Foundation
Rachel Rose, ILM, Diversity+Inclusion WG
Jeff Bradley, DreamWorks

Apologies

Agenda

Goals for TAC: Year 2
Conference updates
- Emily: 19-20 August for Open Source Days
- All projects have option of 25min or 55min session, most are going with 55min
- Start at 9AM PDT, will determine how late in the day we will go based on number of projects.
- Will ask projects for preferences of time slot to accommodate other timezones, to avoid repeat / recorded sessions as much as possible
- Working on speaker limit on Zoom webinars (originally limit of 3)
- Requested that each project try to be as diverse as possible in their speakers, even if it means inviting someone from outside TSC to present an update
- Website will be up this week, banner ad in SIGGRAPH mailing
- Commitments from ACES, VFX Reference Platform, Rez is a maybe, chasing down MaterialX, USD a maybe, MeshRoom/AliceVision. Alembic?
- Daniel: usually BOFs have physical attendance, you need conference registration of some sort to have access. But what if open source projects are trying to engage people with as few restrictions as possible. Some projects maybe want to have BOFs with SIGGRAPH rather than Open Source days.
- SIGGRAPH requires $200 registration fee to be able to attend BOFs in their scope.
- ASWF Open Source Days will be free event.
- Want to cater also to brand new attendees without background in our projects.
- Daniel: (some of) our WGs may want to do a BOF as well, use this an opportunity to welcome new contributors, lay out roadmap, identify opportunities for contribution / areas of need.
- Emily: these could be shorter 25min session, could bundle USD WG with a potential USD BOF
- Emily: had discussions with outreach committee about swag: perhaps we could offer opportunity to donate to nonprofit instead. How can we better line up with our D&I mission / effort? Or we could have a swag store tha benefits D&I initiatives. Want to minimize shipping costs.
Contributor License Agreements (CLAs) - John
- Number of projects have been using LF shortform CLA with success
- Some newer projects from Disney entities have had questions from Disney legal around some of the terms of these agreements, brought about meeting of legal committee a couple of months ago.
- General consensus: need to get as consistent a CLA template as possible, and because Apache CLA more widely used in the industry than LF Short Form CLA, we should converge on Apache CLA. Heard back from Disney legal that this is OK with them, should help with OpenShadingLanguage and OpenTimelineIO to migrate to ASWF repo.
- How does this impact things going forward? How should projects think about this?
- Projects are not required to use the CLA contribution framework. Projects don’t need to change their charter. Process of charging the charter is entirely project dependent. TSCs for new projects should decide how they want to proceed, LF (Steve Winslow) is happy to assist and answer questions, work with legal teams to answer questions.
- Existing projects do not have to make any changes, no need to change existing CLA process. Would recommend to TSC chairs that if there have been community concerns because of CLA terms, should have discussion in the community to consider the Apache CLA. But that’s not a requirement.
- Larry: can a project have more than one CLA to select from? John: that’s typically not a good idea. But projects that came into the ASWF with an existing CLA and picked a different one going forward, no need for older contributors to go back and resign a new CLA.
- Larry: for projects that haven’t established CLA, is the Apache CLA “officially” what we should go forward with? John: should be able to go now (standard Apache CLA). Larry: the Apache CLA mentions the Apache license, but some of our projects don’t use the Apache license. Would be great to have a “blessed” version. John: there should be a complete disconnect vs the Apache CCLA / ICLA, and the desire of the legal committee is to use these CLAs in original form.
- Daniel: let’s submit PRs to the tac and aswf-sample-project repos. John: legal committee is not there to mandate anything to the TAC but to make recommendations. Daniel: worth having a discussion at TAC level to gauge appetite for changing CLA of existing projects, or just going forward with new ones.
- Nick: does this mean that Disney employees are unblocked to contribute to ASWF projects? John: Disney to provide guidance, providing an Apache CCLA.
- Joshua: we can use the template project to test the end-to-end process, instead of doing this on a “live” project. There may be unknown blockers until we’ve actually done it. John: would need to work with Steve (LF legal) to figure out how that would be done.
- John: try to get all major contributing organizations to sign the CCLA before transitioning a project. But there is overhead to adding CCLA to a project.
- Kimball: would it not be possible to do an umbrella CCLA for every ASWF project? John: some issues with projects under different licenses, don’t know if moving to the Apache CCLA resolves that issue or not. But every project wold need to align to the same CCLA, could be a sticking point. But worth discussing. Kimball: would also help people to contribute to any ASWF projects without having to consult with corporate legal team. John: desire from everyone is to make it as simple as possible.
- Michael: not opposed to switching CLAs, but currently too busy to do right now. Larry: would be a switch back to CLA that OCIO had before joining ASWF.
- Daniel: are there techniques to help with transition? John: “cold turkey” is the best approach once a project has decided to switch. Can have a grace period around cutover to help. Having 2 CLAs active at same time is usually a problematic practice.
- OpenCue has Apache CLA, OpenVDB, OpenColorIO, OpenEXR have LF shortform, OpenTimelineIO and OpenShadingLanguage are stuck in “CLA purgatory” but now have a way forward.
- Daniel: next step to reach out to project TSCs, would be preferable to try to move every project to a compatible (Apache) CLA.
Working Groups
- Diversity & Inclusion
  - Rachel: since last TAC meeting, sent out survey to WG member, gathered useful info, will meet every 4 weeks, will use Google Drive, gathered thoughts and opinions on what goals will be.
  - Drafted goals document:
    - Encourage high school and college students to contribute to M&E-related open source projects (external facing goals)
    - Ensure that ASWF has diverse leadership across foundation and projects
    - Better education internally at companies
  - Discussed initiatives under each of these 3 goals.
  - First step is to put together D&I blog posts for ASWF web site, can be done quickly!
  - Emily: updates to web site with links to project, pulled some intro courses from LF web site
  - Rachel: should be ready to officially submit WG charter to TAC very soon
  - Emily: need to figure out best communication channels with each project
  - Meetings are second wednesday of each month. Sub initiatives can have meetings on off weeks.
- Python 3
  - Ashley: working on deliverables document
  - Progress a bit slow, found that groups that are turning up aren’t very far (if at all) into Python 3 transition, so more looking for guidance than offer guidance
  - Autodesk representative at last meeting which was good, having issues getting representation from vendors.
  - Daniel / Emily will help reach out to vendors
  - Daniel: do we have representation from ASWF projects? We haven’t done a checkin across the projects.
  - Ashley: hasn’t really been discussed as a topic. So far no one has pointed to an ASWF project as a Python 3 blocker
  - Stable cadence: every two weeks, alternating between earlier and later in the day Vancouver time to accommodate timezones
- USD
  - Some practical issues with Wiki contributions that need to be worked out
- CI
  - For projects interested in porting to Apple Silicon, contact drwave@apple.com if you want remote access to the Apple Developer Transition Kit at MacStadium.
  - Larry: any updates on GitHub Actions supporting Apple Silicon for CI builds? Wave: someone from Apple will be at next CI meeting and should be able to answer that. Shouldn’t be a problem.
  - Porting projects to Apple Silicon should make them able to run on iOS / iPadOS
  - Andrew / Michael: initial GPU build of OCIO on AWS CodeBuilder fired off, initially failed but should be working soon. Remaining issues with not being able to have access to secrets to build from PRs.
  - Michael: won’t necessary be able to run test suite on PRs before merge. Andrew: would need a development branch where you accept PRs to run testing, then merge from dev branch to main branch.
Technical Project updates
- Larry / Kris: excited about the CLA blocker being resolved
- OCIO / Michael: issues with first time contributors not reading contribution documentation first, looking to install some pre-PR hooks to help with that
Update on candidate projects
Next meeting
- 29 July 2020

ASWF TAC Meeting - July 15, 2020

Voting member attendance

Other Attendees

Apologies

Agenda

Action Items (AIs)

Notes

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