Academy Software Foundation - Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - November 15, 2023

Join the meeting at https://zoom-lfx.platform.linuxfoundation.org/meeting/97880950229?password=81d2940e-c055-43b9-9b5a-6cd7d7090feb

Voting member attendance

Premier member Representatives

Project Representatives

Carol Payne - OpenColorIO Representative
Cary Phillips - OpenEXR Representative
Chris Kulla - Open Shading Language (OSL) Representative
Jonathan Stone - MaterialX Representative
Joshua Minor - OpenTimelineIO Representative
Ken Museth - OpenVDB Representative

Industry Representatives

Jean-Francois Panisset - Visual Effects Society

Non Voting Projects, Working Groups, Linux Foundation

Other Attendees

Darin Grant, Animal Logic / ASWF
JT Nelson, Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Joseph Goldstone, ARRI
Lee Kerley, Sony Imageworks
Timothy Porter
Ben Giles, Caligra
Ben Schofield
Doug Walker, Autodesk / OCIO
Daniel Heckenberg, Netflix
Dhruv Gorvil, Apple

Apologies

Scott Wilson - Working Group for Rust Bindings Representative
Cary Phillips - OpenEXR Representative

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Agenda

TAC Chairperson and Industry Representative re-election #537 (John)
Hosted Projects Resource Request Process #461 (Darin Grant)
Guidance/input to Apple re: Uniform Type Identifiers for the various ASWF projects - they are akin to MIME types (Druv Govil / Michael B. Johnson
Project Proposal - OpenQMC #434
Transition to LFX Meeting Management #460 (John)
Project Proposal - OpenQMC #434

Notes

TAC Chairperson and Industry Representative re-election #537 (John)
- 2 things we do: TAC has ability to appoint up to 3 industry representatives, currently only JF, doing it for many years, TAC would need to renew this, perhaps in December meeting
- TAC reviews chair person annually, see if someone else might be interested. Kimball has done it for 3 years, Daniel before. If someone is interested, Kimball would be happy to yield. Goal would be to dig into this in meeting on the 29th, see if we need to open up an election
Hosted Projects Resource Request Process #461 (Darin Grant)
- A bit of a repeat to presentation to Governing Board, looking at next year’s budget
- ASWF has a reasonable surplus, around $900K
- We are growing membership, and thus revenue
- Want the business as usual running to fit within revenue to maintain surplus
- Why maintain a surplus? Rather than business as usual to eat into surplus, want to make sure TAC can give guidance of what we should invest in. Invest based on TAC (or Governing Board) requests, for instance D&I efforts. Want a clear process for anyone from the TAC or projects to request ASWF to invest in.
- Link to proposal
- Budget committee meets once a month to review and approve
- Examples: infrastructure needs, skill needs, good
- John: some requests may require funding on the back end, or bring in a tool or skill we already have in Linux Foundation, sometimes there are similar needs from different foundations.
- Darin: there’s a large portion of budget dedicated to IT services, can be a bit opaque, that team wrote up what they actually do as a result of this funding, looking at that gives an idea what’s in scope for funding.
- Darin: was really insightful in understanding what is done, for instance how to get AWS, GitHub credits (LF IT/RE Services Key Contributions document, document link to follow)
- Ben Giles: currently working on Wayland color management, how do we help that effort? Darin: that’s a request for spend, we steer away from bug bounties or things like that. What form would such a resource request be? Ben: as part of VFX Reference Platform, maybe a SIG under that organization, dealing with transition from X11 to Wayland. If Caligara was to drive this effort, what sort of resources could we have access to, for instance a GSoC like effort?
- John: this process is designed for project currently under ASWF. How to bring a new effort under ASWF, and what would be resources available?
- Ben: we started an effort, some talk previously. It’s about continuing that effort, what would it look like concretely. David: would this be the workstation working group? Ben: yes, Workstation Experience group as well. We would be willing to help drive both of these efforts, including hiring people. But would need requirements and advice, something to work towards. We want it to be a cross industry effort.
- Darin: Working Group structure in ASWF is likely the right place for such an effort. Ben: that seems indeed like the right place. John: will follow up.
- JF: expect requests for new CI runner types: Apple Silicon, ARM Linux, GPU, larger runners…
- Darin: hopefully LF pull can help reduce the cost
- John: Andrew Grimberg has been working with GitHub to gain beta (free for now) access to new runners. Also was able to work with AWS for DPEL to get cloud requests, equivalent to around $25K of AWS credits, helps to offset other areas of the budget.
- John: as you may have resource needs, we often have access to those resources, we have existing agreements we can leverage so we can get those services for our projects
- John: if you come to us first, we can often help, combine efforts, tap into other work the LF is doing
- Darin: skill need: JT mentioned in chat for-pay testing services. Documentation another possible area. Could also use project management skills, these could all be interesting to explore.
- John: we tend not to advise projects to hire direct development staff, tends to stifle the ability of a project to scale, costs are high. But specialty needs can often tap into existing skills: documentation, training, events. QA and Project Management could be interesting to explore, some of our larger foundations have “community architects”. If there’s a broad need out there, we could figure out what that looks like. That’s what I’ve seen most success with, less so with dev resources.
- John: will package this and present it to the board for approval, hoping to have process up in running in next few weeks.
Guidance/input to Apple re: Uniform Type Identifiers for the various ASWF projects - they are akin to MIME types (Druv Govil / Michael B. Johnson
- Apple looking for guidance on naming convention for Uniform Type Identifiers
- Druv: on Apple platforms, we use MIME types at the system level identifiers: com.pixar.universalscenedescription
- Was hoping to register something like io.aswf.materialx for instance, but is there an alternate naming convention? Normally it’s the opposite of the web site order
- Currently OpenEXR is com.ilm.open-exr
- Anyone has thoughts? Is io.aswf correct?
- Eric R: on OTIO we’ve done tinkering with MEME, we’ve used opentimeline.io, would be nice to have guidance on what we want to do generally, brings up the question of what a project does in the future if it leaves the aswf? Wave: don’t have to pick just one, what Druv is looking for is what the top level should look like? Should it be io.aswf.project? org.aswf.project? OTIO issue discussion
- Eric E: are there other io. types? Druv: there aren’t others, but there are other org. for instance org.khronos.gltf
- [Uniform Type Identifier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Type_Identifier#:~:text=A%20Uniform%20Type%20Identifier%20(UTI,class%20or%20type%20of%20item)
- Dhruv: uttype --all to list existing types
- Gordon: we don’t own aswf.org and there’s something else there, so we should go with io.aswf
- John: we should add a document in the TAC site to capture this if the intention is to have projects align, happy to help with, just need help since don’t know the right words.
- Ben: same with GNOME / GTK, they have the same thing, they need the same Java-style reverse DNS style identifiers
- Wave: we want a convention that also makes sense on Windows and Linux
- John: proposal seems to be well received, want to submit a proposal? Wave: yes, Druv and I will submit something.
Project Proposal - OpenQMC #434
Transition to LFX Meeting Management #460 (John)
- Only OpenCue and OpenEXR left to move over, all others are moved over
- Will get insight on attendance, thank you for the support
Project Proposal - OpenQMC #434
- Eric Enderton: got someone to take a look, NVIDIA has no problems with it, talking to NVIDIA legal to see if we can put something in the repo to state this, but expect this to be fine
- John: that was what the TAC was looking for, statement from NVIDIA
- John: good progress!