Academy Software Foundation - Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - July 10, 2024

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

Voting Representative Attendees

Premier Member Representatives

Project Representatives

Carol Payne - OpenColorIO Representative
Cary Phillips - OpenEXR Representative
Chris Kulla - Open Shading Language Representative
Diego Tavares Da Silva - OpenCue Representative
Jonathan Stone - MaterialX Representative
Ken Museth - OpenVDB Representative

Industry Representatives

Jean-Francois Panisset - Visual Effects Society

Non-Voting Attendees

Non-Voting Project and Working Group Representatives

LF Staff

David Morin - Academy Software Foundation
Emily Olin - Academy Software Foundation
John Mertic - The Linux Foundation
Yarille Ortiz - The Linux Foundation

Other Attendees

JT Nelson, Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Andrew Grimberg, LF RelEng
Daniel Greenstein, Sony Imageworks
Ben Giles, Calligra
Robin Rowe, Cinepaint
Deke Kincaid, Digital Domain
Guy Martin, NVIDIA
Lee Kerley, Apple
Bill Ballew, Dreamworks

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Agenda

General Updates
- ReadTheDocs inventory #672
- Open Source Days 2024 #650
- Dev Days 2024 #662
- New calendar for LFX Meetings #684

Notes

ReadTheDocs inventory #672 (John)
- Every projects forwards to docs.projectname.org, all your domains should forward / redirect
- Also some projects which have “legacy” URLs
- Action item: projects give heads up if you want to port to new URL
- Larry: thanks for doing this, having a “docs” for every project is really helpful
- John: good practice we will roll out across all our foundations
New calendar for LFX Meetings #684
- every project has ical.projectname.org
- Not yet a ical.aswf.io still needs some fixes
- Can subscribe to the 3 icals you want for the projects you want for instance
- Some projects don’t have domains, mostly working groups. Will update the landscape to add a direct URL.
- Have a feature to have an ical icon
- Please take next 2 weeks to test this. Probably not high priority before SIGGRAPH, we’ll decommission the lists.aswf.io calendars after SIGGRAPH. If a project wants to keep it, they can, but will be responsible for maintaining them
- KimbalL: what’s the domain for the TAC? John: would be under ical.aswf.io but not working yet.
- Scott: for the WGs, how are you planning to deal with those? John: we can share source URLs, share through the Landscape
- JC: will there be a procedure to transition from mailing list calendar to LFX calendar? Rez still using the mailing list calendar, how will be moving users? John: will be manual / need to communicate directly. If projects want to maintain the original, we can do that.
Dev Days 2024 #662
- 6 projects registered, but still a window to register
- registration form and web site will be up next week
Open Source Days 2024 #650
- Update from Emily later in the meeting
Engineering Contribution Assessment
- Larry: hoping that next TAC meeting just before SIGGRAPH. Is that still on? John: week we’re doing virtual town halls…
- Larry: if we have it, would like to give final update, so if people see each other in person after that, have a topic of conversation.
- Carol: would it be better to do it at leadership meeting? Larry: was going to give a couple of high level slides, but may not be time for real discussion. We don’t need to have a meeting just for that.
- David: could we have time at the 8AM meeting before open source days? Larry: could be available for that. Also if there’s a slot where there’s no talk in the room we have reserved, could have an informal meeting there as well. Wish I had done this earlier so I could have booked a slot to give a talk on this. But if there is an open slot, I would do it. John: let’s talk offline, we can figure something out.
- Only 2-3 projects haven’t updated
Atlassian Cloud Migration (Andy)
- Atlassian Cloud Migration
- For all the projects that have Atlassian products managed by LF
- ASWF is no longer using JIRA
- Wiki is having problems for last 3 weeks, trying to figure it out, but hopefully we can put it to the side.
- Benefits of Atlassian Cloud
  - Costs reduction ($300/$500 per month)
  - Removal of infrastructure management
  - Easier scalability
  - Improved applications dependencies and compatibilities
  - Obtaining updates and in real time
  - INcreased availability and reliability
  - …
- Easier Scalability
  - Cloud systems can scale both vertically…
- Getting Easy Updates in Real Time
  - Atlassian Cloud upgrades the products constantly and in real time, the products are always on the latest version available.
- Centralized Governance
  - Accelerated administration with a centralized mission control center.
- Improved Security
  - Atlassian Cloud products will always have the latest security patches available without any interaction required.
- Data privacy and compliance
- Q3 2024
  - Internal LF JIRA and Confluence have been migrated (June 26)
  - Q3 - All OSS projects need to be migrated
  - Next steps after this presentation
    - New Atlassian sites are created
    - Ensure Open Source License for granted…
- Atlassian Jira Standard Tier features
  - More information as presented in Atlassian Pricing
    - Standard tier
  - User limit per site: 20K instead of 50K
- FAQ
  - Reason for the move
  - Who do I contact if I ahve further questions, comments or concerns
  - Can I login to the cloud side using my LFID account
  - How would I login?
    - The users can login at atlassian.com with their email address
  - What can I do if I can’t login to the cloud?
  - New URLs:
    - https://lf-project.atlassian.net
    - Confluence/Wiki link: https://lf-project.atlassian.net/wiki/home
  - Vanity URLs would require a paid instance
  - …
- Kimball: we’ve had issues with plugins, no idea if we’re using them? Andy: we’re having issues with the self hosted version in last 3 weeks, haven’t seen any plugins outside the normal / not cloud compatible. JT: will there be forwarding? Andy: Wiki space will move to the same space name under the new URL, but top level URLs will change. Should be able to do some basic URL forwarding.
- JF: could you use LF as an IdP? Andy: related to email addresses. The SAML integration that Atlassian Cloud offers requires that you are locked into a set of domain email addresses. LF identity are based on external email addresses, so we can’t use LF ID as an IdP, even with a paid tier.
- JF: seems that Atlassian really wants everyone to move to cloud version. Andy: migrated to datacenter versions last year, we were still getting free licenses. Some Atlassian customers with self-hosted requirements will likely force datacenter to go on for ever. But LF doesn’t really have resources to manage these products, have to patch CVEs regularly, issues managing systems. This is not our “bread and butter”, there have been internal discussions relative to costs passed on to projects, costs likely to go up, tacking on administrative overhead. For now only passing on the cloud costs, not the admin costs.
- Andy: current instance is located in EU, so it is GDPR compliant. If we had a force a region, we could use a different region. LF Jira / Confluence was re-homed to the US.
- Kimball: we’re having a less than stellar integration with Okta. Andy: LF ID is using Auth0, which is owned by Okta, but we can’t use LF ID anyway.
- Gordon: do we have metrics on usage? Andy: don’t have the metrics, especially right now. Had metrics for JIRA which allowed us to turn it off, so that was easier. But this Confluence is used actively. If we wanted to switch to another Wiki, recommendation would be to use the GitHub wiki. A lot less feature full, but tied to everything we’re already doing.
- Scott (chat): My only concern is from what I understand, Australia does have laws in place that can break encryption, and Atlassian may have to break encryption if the government asks (as they are an Asustralian company). If this is fine, or I completely misunderstood/misremembered, then cool. Kimball (chat): I’d have to ask / remember, but I feel like they have a mechanism to manage the sovereignty in different regions (if you require), not that I think we particularly care about that? Ben: (chat) The Australian government can only break encryption when organizations refuse or are unable to defend critical infrastructure. I don’t think it would apply here. Scott: Well, worst case, we could always move the wiki to something like mdbook or something. Gary: We’re using the wiki, but could switch to an open-source wiki in a heartbeat. +1 for move to gh wiki — keep things simple. JT: A feature analysis would reveal if any unique or advanced features of our wiki is being used, especially ones that don’t have GH equivalents. Off of the top of my head, many if not most of the advanced features not provided on GH are not being used, just OTH, needs a close look IMO and experience. Ben: It seems silly in hindsight to be held up if it’s mostly just a wiki? Carol: I mean, I get that it’s easy-ish to move going forward, but what about our histories? Let’s move to the cloud first and then decide this move later. Ben: For equations it needs to be GH pages, not wiki. It does not do LaTeX.
- Gordon: why did we originally pick this? Andy: at the time Confluence was supported by LF, and GitHub wiki wasn’t very well developed.
- John: we will need to do this urgent migration, and we can discuss future migrations after SIGGRAPH
OpenQMC
- Guy Martin from NVIDIA presented NVIDIA legal position on IP considerations in OpenQMC project proposal
- ASWF to consult with LF for further clarification of IP implications
Open Source Days (Emily)
- BoFs not currently posted on the SIGGRAPH site yet (having issues) but posted on ASWF site.
- Templates have been posted
- David: registered attendees? Emily: 160 in person, 40 virtual. This is fantastic. David: our biggest registration ever! A lot of credit to Emily and team. And thank you for everyone presenting at Town Halls, BoFs and Open Source Days
- Carol: what’s the max we can hold in the room? Emily: we may past the max for our room, but you get 50% attrition, and people come in and out during the day, so shouldn’t be an issue. David: we talked about calling it “full”, but for now we’re leaving registration open.
- Emily: will touch base with Larry about potential for eng contributions discussion