Academy Software Foundation - Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - August 7, 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
Andrew Grimberg, LF Release Engineering

Other Attendees

Ben Schofield, CDSA
Lorna Dumba - Framestore / OpenQMC
Rob Rowe, Cinepaint
Ryan Bottriell, ILM / spk
Deke Kincaid, Digital Domain
Joe Bryant, O3DE
Lee Kerley, Apple
Ryan Bottriell, ILM / spk

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Agenda

General Updates
- Dev Days 2024 #662
- Engineering Contribution Assessment #685
- Project Proposal - OpenQMC #434
- Schedule office hours for projects to complete OpenSSF Best Practices badge requirements #760
- Establish a slack channel for SPK #780
- Change to public calendar for Academy Software Foundation #782

Meeting Notes

Change to public calendar for Academy Software Foundation #782
- Using this month as transition, will turn off at end of month
- If a project needs to keep the old calendar, like having meeting notices going to mailing lists, project will need to maintain themselves
- Eric R: can you send a link to a specific event in new calendar? John: not sure. Andy: not away of anything like that, would need to open support ticket. John: is this to have someone join a specific meeting? Eric: yes, to communicate with guest speakers for instance. John: you may need to have access to the management console. We can ask if there could be an explicit link. Andy: I’ve asked but haven’t had a response yet. Eric: not a showstopper, just an inconvenience
Dev Days 2024 #662
- John: applications are open, but if any project still wants to join
- Larry: projects can jump in at any time if you can do the prep. People who are leaders in the company: if you are people who need to / want to participate, time is getting close, especially if there are CLAs to be signed, start that well ahead of time.
Engineering Contribution Assessment #685
- Larry: please watch the video from ASWF Open Source Days on YouTube, nicely encapsulated in the talk
- During SIGGRAPH, people were coming up saying information was interesting, and are interested in “matchmaking”, we have resources, and want to get people together
- Dev Days is the good first step in that direction, getting a few people familiar with projects
Project Proposal - OpenQMC #434
- Eric E: working in the background on onboarding
- Lorna: great conversations internally at SIGGRAPH, looking at paper work, also how we can support to move this forward. Please reach out if you need anything.
Schedule office hours for projects to complete OpenSSF Best Practices badge requirements #760
- Had been postponed to after SIGGRAPH
- Share what has been done, especially on OpenEXR
- Bring in other resources if needed
- John: when do we want to get this started, and what’s a good cadence to do this? Should we get started in next week or two? Or wait longer?
- Carol: if we could push to next month that would be great, projects are working towards releases after SIGGRAPH but don’t want to kick the can too far down the road.
- John: Could we look at Aug 28th and block the hour?
- Larry: can we impose on Cary to make sure he can be there? Pick a specific issue and walk all the projects through? That could help build momentum
- Cary: wanted to offer a hands on, step through how we configured the OpenEXR repo. Not super complicated, I’m out for 10 days between now and 28th, so doesn’t leave much time to prepare.
- John: sure, if that’s easier for the group. So Sept 25th instead? Cary: that’s at Dev Days. Is there something simple you could walk us through on Aug 28th? Cary: yes, I should be able to put something together. Some things I don’t have a very deep understanding of, but just followed the instructions. Need to refresh my memory. Also struggling with CodeQL build failures.
- John: will get this on the calendar, and we can record. Cary: if you can figure out what you want to tackle. Cary: have some notes on Confluence, that’s what we will go over.
- OpenEXR Wiki Project Security Hardening Steps
Establish a slack channel for SPK #780
- Ryan: we announced spk at Digipro, we have a separate Slack instance, people are lukewarm at adding another Slack instance, it would seem like it would be useful to have a channel in ASWF Slack, but it’s not an ASWF project yet.
- Larry: there’s a bit of a tension we recognize, we don’t want to be in the business of doling out resources to non-ASWF projects, opens the door to everyone trying to “ride our coat tails”. But we want the ASWF communication channels to handle anything of concern to the members. Some member companies are interested in this project. Do the TAC reps from the members feel we should do this?
- John: is there potential interest of this project becoming an ASWF project? Ryan: the project is healthy, it’s not in need of support, we’re not necessarily “in need”, but none of us have anything against that idea. What’s not clear is “who else is going to want to participate”, if it just remains ILM / Imageworks, we have a functional process, so there might not be a gain to become a project. Larry: there’s no rush, there’s no problem with having it incubate where it is. It has proven that to companies can work together. My personal feeling is that it’s not quite in the right stage in its lifecycle to join ASWF, hasn’t become “fundamental” to many people, or unable to grow without it. But could grow into important shared resource, at which point we would not hesitate to submit it.
- Carol: we’re just talking about a Slack channel? Anyone has the ability to create one, right? Are we concerned about number of new Slack users? Doesn’t seem to be much.
- John: cost aspect is if you have people not already in our Slack instance.
- Emily: if we do it, it should be an “unofficial” channel, we don’t want a number of projects to create channels. Maybe it becomes an “interested users” Channel. Larry: Ryan and I are sensitive to not wanting to abuse our position as members, would love to have this disambiguated by someone outside Sony / ILM say “yes this would be useful”.
- Larry: let’s continue on its existing Slack channel for now, in the coming months if we see more ASWF members participating, then we can revisit? It sounds like it’s mostly for me and Ryan for now. Ryan: it’s fine, there may be other member studios interested which is my motivation, but happy to revisit in a few months. Larry: let’s let it “bootstrap” until it becomes apparent
Open Source Days
- Emily 370 people on site, best attendance to date. Thank you to everyone who participated
- Larry: thanks for getting videos up quickly, was able to point people to it.
- Emily: links changed due to an edit. Larry: viewer counts as well.
- Virtual Town Hall recordings will be up this week
- Eric R: loved presentations about topics that wasn’t their own projects, like Kimball’s presentation about making software to last 50 years. Cary: we barely scratched the surface on this topic! Eric: great to get people thinking about this. Would love to hear part 2!
- Larry: great keynote by Darin as well. Emily invited him.