ASWF TAC Meeting - May 05, 2021

Video Conference Link

Voting member attendance

Other Attendees

John Mertic, Linux Foundation
Rachel Romoff, Linux Foundation
JT Nelson, Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Mathieu Mazerolle, Foundry
Patrick Hodoul, Autodesk / OCIO
Nick Porcino, Pixar
Ashley Whetter, Python 3 WG
Scott Wilson, Rust WG
Alex Meddick, Rising Sun Pictures
Mitch Prater, Laika
Steve Ira (LF IT team)
Jordan Evans (LF IT team)
Deke Kincaid, Digital Domain
Michael Zink, WarnerMedia
Erik Strauss (Netflix Playback/review WG co-chair)

Apologies

Agenda

MaterialX approved by Governing Board as well, yay, welcome!
- Approved officially by Governing Board last week
LFX Chat demo (John
- Jordan from LF IT to provide a demo of LF Chat, based on Matrix
- Steve Ira: LF has lots of projects, Open Source communities define the chat system they want to use, smaller communities have been asking for a solution
- Created infrastructure and defining policies, have a couple of PoC projects
- Not every open source project wants to use Matrix, some want to use a public/free Slack, some a paid for one, some IRC, some Discord
- Want to fit into vision of collaboration of a project, and help projects that are platform agnostic but just want something
- Matrix is connected to LF SSO, sign-in with LF SSO
- Matrix is similar to Slack and other modern Slack platforms
- Left tab has People and Rooms
- Most projects want to use something like Slack, but run into free instance retention limit (10K) and complexity to invite new user
- LF Matrix has limits on message retention, looking at archiving old messages after a couple of years into something like a S3 bucket so you can still get to old messages / search archives
- Screenshot
- Scott: how would you compare Matrix and Slack, does Matrix support threads? Jordan: Matrix has “replies”, but not a separate right panel view for a thread like Slack. This is a current design decision in Matrix.
- Matrix has an API that you can hit with a token to post a payload into a channel, so could be used for GitHub events. Beta for LF Chat is working on bringing projects into the platform, and will be working into integrations.
- Roadmap
  - Onboard a couple of projects as a beta
  - Automation around self service for the platform. Some things have been disabled such as channel creation for arbitrary users, since we want to know what LF project a new channel is associated to (for long term analytics). Also looking at self service panel for moderators.
  - Then common integrations: Zoom, GitHub, CIs (Jenkins, GitHub Actions)
  - Brian: is there a mobile app / a way to get notifications? Jordan: what is being shown is “Element” front end, which has a web, desktop and mobile application, and you can set up notifications through all of these.
  - Matrix supports video and audio calls through Jitsi, currently working and expect to be “production ready” next week. Kimball: can you record the video? Jordan: doesn’t support recording natively, but something LF IT can look into. Not as full featured as Zoom, more similar to Google Meet / Slack Video calls.
- Is ASWF interested in being part of a PoC? Kimball: biggest hurdle is running another app, but looks promising. Jordan: also supported by third party apps. Element is an Electron app.
- JT: Gitter now using Matrix as a backend
- Questions of evaluating alternative to Slack? John: message retention of the free instance is the main issue. Pro tier is an “elastic” cost (per user / month), depends on the number of active users. A couple of years ago the TAC had looked at the cost and it was decided it wasn’t worth it. Could be around $20K annually. LF solution would be bundled in the existing IT (fixed) costs from LF charged to ASWF. Also this would tie in with existing SSO that’s being used across other LF services such as Wiki, mailing list.
- Kimball: we want to be able to support new users without barriers (inclusion), are we trying to solve a problem we don’t have? Larry: we’ve never heard a clear statement on our budget limit. John: we can know how much it would cost today based on registered users. Larry: would be good to have an actual number. Kimball: that conversation hasn’t happened in any governing board meetings.
- Larry: we could also split across multiple workspaces without loss of functionality.
- John: are we agreeing that for near / mid term we want to stick with Slack?
- Scott: there could be a flood of new members from the Rust community. Kimball: we should pull some numbers to see how many active users we currently have for Slack and what it would cost. John: it would be around $1200/month, so not horrendous.
- Larry: the retention problem is real, the cutoff is currently Feb 9 2021. Kimball: action item is to calculate budget needed to turn on message retention. John: can work on that. Daniel: the Slack business model doesn’t really fit our requirements, cost implications of growth. Would be useful if we could find a platform / approach that first our needs. Steve Ira: intention presentation wasn’t to “sell” the solution, looking for candidate projects. It could be disruptive to a project that’s already using Slack a lot. Problem for (smaller) projects that can’t afford the growth, There’s no rush, offering will “go live” towards the end of the year, so ASWF could always switch at a later date.
Review of project lifecycle/working groups proposal changes (John)
- Discussion with Kimball to review the project life cycle, PR in TAC repo
- 2 or 3 years into foundation existence, start to feel the need to review the process
- https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/tac/pull/243
- How can we align with other foundations
- Should we add a “sandbox” stage for very early stage / experimental stage, so can have cooperation in the context of the ASWF, without all the costs / overhead of a “full blown” project.
- Beefing up some of the requirements on the “Incubation Stage” projects, projects which would have already gone through the Sandbox stage would typically already have a a lot of those requirements in place. “Moving the bar up”
- Adopted Stage projects would require Gold-level CII badge
- Added more clarity on benefits, as well as review project (which we haven’t done in a very prescriptive way so far).
- Projects should have a well defined way to engage with the TAC.
- Also focussing on WGs working within the constraint of an established charter
- Also more definition around timeframe for WGs: https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/tac/pull/242
- Kimball: everyone should read the PR, will mail a link to the list. We can approve the PR as a group at next meeting.
Preview of TAC site (John)
- See screenshot
- Will get turned on, and will avoid issues with failing GitHub Actions on PRs
Technical Project Updates
- OCIO
  - about to release next patch release with some semi critical fixes, trying to ump VFX reference platform for CY2022 to 2.1.x, deadline to release is end of August after coordinating with VFX Reference Platform
  - Accepted to do a long course at SIGGRAPH, deep dive in architecture and implementation of OCIO v2, deadline for recorded course is June 11.
- Opencue
  - Discussed feedback from TAC on graduation process
- OpenEXR
  - Things have been pretty quiet, steady trickly of issues, probably a patch release in a week or so. On the security front it looks like the bug reports that have been coming from Google OSS Fuzz are being turned into public VEs which doesn’t really mean much, by the time they are exposed, we have a fix for them, but it adds a bit of urgency on documentation. The good new is that the OSS Fuzz reports have died down to a trickle, just got one in the last few weeks, so that’s a good sign.
- OSL
  - Main activity has been chatting with MaterialX to standardize closures. First draft in good shape, will provide header definitions. Started discussions on a reference implementation for the BSDFs that will be part of the OSL test render project. A piece of the puzzle that’s been missing for a long time.
- OTIO
  - TSC charter got stuck for a while on trademark agreement, but should be moving forward now. Change asked by legal folks about wording around trademarks, may end up affecting other TSC charters related to Disney.
  - Last TSC meeting, Autodesk interested in integrating OTIO in RV.
  - Hoping to integrate with Review & Approval WG activities.
- Raw2Aces
  - No update from Alex, looking at how to relicense, code is prepped from WETA to push into repo as soon as the license situation is resolved.
Working Group Updates
- Asset Repository
  - Wave: Intel taking a crack at some reworking, good feedback from “league of lawyers” meeting. Context info on the licensing of Moana dataset.
  - What do we do if we get more contributions than we expect, both from storage and scope point of view.
  - Will look for guidance from the projects, “would you find this contribution useful”
- CI Working Group
  - Daniel: Looking at the broader package management problem, moving from “ad hoc” methods to more sophisticated approaches, series of presentations from studios such as Sony and ILM on the topic
  - Qt5: KDE patch collection : Qt Company will no longer provide long term support for Qt5, move “free” community to Qt6. KDE Group is starting a patch collection to provide community oriented long term support.
  - Wayland: coming up in a oblique way, requests to add Wayland to some of our CI Docker images. Wayland doesn’t yet “play well” with some of our platform / hardware choices.
  - JFrog Artifactory is happening, includes XRay for dependency scanning.
  - Gordon: would love to join the discussion on Qt and Wayland. Daniel: maybe we dedicate some discussion time at the next TAC? Kimball: have been doing some experimentation with Wayland, so very interested.
- Diversity & Inclusion
  - Bill: nothing major
- Python 3:
  - Ashley: nothing to report, WG has been going on for a year, initial deliverables were taken of, somewhat running out of discussion topics, waiting for feedback from studios. Vendors are mostly done with transition. May keep meeting every couple of weeks, may switch to an on-demand schedule. Kimball: good time to read the lifecyle of WG PR, this could be an opportunity to close down a WG that has completed its mandate.
- Rust
  - Scott: Digipro/SIGGRAPH, planning to have separate talks. Waht to deliver OpenEXR in Rust. Have a website in progress, working towards MVP for OpenEXR bindings, currently reading / writing. All the crates are now owned by LF, friday meeting to touch base.
- USD
  - WebViz: USD toolkit in WebAssembly
  - Investigation into USD Standard Camera
  - Meeting today, getting clear understanding of how physical and practical cameras can be represented in CG workflow. Looking at real world standards for lenses and cameras, and Nick Porcino’s rig.
  - Looking at NVIDIA to do presentation at USD extension. WOrk at Pasadena open source group, how to embed “headless” DCCs into Jupyter notebooks
- Review/Approval WG
  - Track 1: Standardized exchange of review data
    - Stage: Discovery
    - Status: Sam Richards leading initial discovery of commonalities
    - Expected outcome: WIP proposal doc
  - Track 2: Shared open source Playback module Project
    - Stage: Discovery
    - Status: Dneg preparing presentation on their OS offering for the next meeting(5/11), to compare to the SPI offering and determine community support.
    - Expected outcome: a TBC proposal to the TAC on a new OS project housed and managed by ASWF to support community efforts for a shared collection of modules for creating a media playback system.