Academy Software Foundation Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - November 12, 2025

Join the meeting at https://zoom-lfx.platform.linuxfoundation.org/meetings/aswf?view=list&projects=aswf

Voting Representative Attendees

Premier Member Representatives

Project Representatives

Carol Payne - Diversity & Inclusion Working Group Representative, OpenColorIO Representative
Cary Phillips - OpenEXR Representative
Chris Kulla - Open Shading Language Representative
Daniel Greenstein - OpenImageIO Representative
Diego Tavares Da Silva - OpenCue Representative
Jonathan Stone - MaterialX Representative
Ken Museth - OpenVDB Representative
Nick Porcino - Universal Scene Description Working Group Representative
Rachel Rose - Diversity & Inclusion Working Group 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

Alyssa Alexis - SIGGRAPH
Ben Schofield - CDSA
Cameron Target
Cottalango Leon - SPI - OpenCue
Doug Walker - Autodesk - OCIO
Eric Powers - Dreamworks
Lee Kerley - Apple - MaterialX
Jim Geduldick - Spacboy Labs
Jonathan Swartz - NVIDIA
Olga Avramenko - SPI - D&I WG

Antitrust Policy Notice

Linux Foundation meetings involve participation by industry competitors, and it is the intention of the Linux Foundation to conduct all of its activities in accordance with applicable antitrust and competition laws. It is therefore extremely important that attendees adhere to meeting agendas, and be aware of, and not participate in, any activities that are prohibited under applicable US state, federal or foreign antitrust and competition laws.

Examples of types of actions that are prohibited at Linux Foundation meetings and in connection with Linux Foundation activities are described in the Linux Foundation Antitrust Policy available at linuxfoundation.org/antitrust-policy. If you have questions about these matters, please contact your company counsel, or if you are a member of the Linux Foundation, feel free to contact Andrew Updegrove of the firm of Gesmer Updegrove LLP, which provides legal counsel to the Linux Foundation.

Agenda

General Updates
- AGENDA TOPIC: AI code assistant policy #1195
- Create a section of the tac repo for project best practices guides #1194
- TAC Vice Chair election #1202
- 2026 Security Reviews #1137
- Project Leads - License Scans just sent out #1212
Annual Review: OpenTimelineIO #477

Notes

General Updates
- AGENDA TOPIC: AI code assistant policy #1195
  - Larry: we don’t have to resolve this today, but wanted to get conversation started. Dev have outside lives, they may be using code assistants for work or personal projects. We should get ahead of the topic and decide what policies we want for our projects, what are the benefits, what are the risks. Each project can make its own rules for what’s good for its community, but a set of baseline guidelines would be good to adopt. LF guidance on hard boundaries would be good as well. As a sampling of issues, most projects have CLAs and DCOs, does that cover code suggestions from coding assistants? What are the policies a project should have, there are projects out there which are being flooded by low quality PRs / bug reports that are LLM generated. Want to make sure our standards aren’t eroded and we aren’t flooded by these. Using coding assistants still means you are just as responsible. Need to have procedures set up.
  - John: a common topic in our foundations, we had a GenAI policy last year but not very specific. Can look at what other foundations are doing.
  - Larry: should the commit message say that LLM was used?
  - Carol: does anything have to change legally? And what do we want to do as a foundation? Bringing this up now, what is relevant to your companies, your projects, then we’ll have discussion next time.
  - Larry: developer team perspective on accepting those contributions, but also as a recipient, don’t want to back projects into areas where member companies may have issues with.
  - John: will get legal feedback.
  - JF: curious about how this interacts with the license chosen by a project
  - Larry: would like to hear about what other projects have adopted, at both ends of the spectrum.
  - John: will do some research, and will report back at next TAC.
  - Kimball (chat): Instead of DCO, need DCR signed-off-by indicator? (Developer Certified Review)
  - Eric Powers: By example, I attempted to use github copilot at work to analyze an open source project and generate a function based on that project, but our NBCU github copilot denied the ability to use copilot referencing this public repository.
- Create a section of the tac repo for project best practices guides #1194
  - Larry: want to find a place to start documenting these. ALl the projects are doing their own thing, some projects have people in common / active in the TAC, some are more “islands”. We need to learn from each other. Want to write “best practices” documents, not compulsory, but a place to share. Seeded it with a document from OIIO, it got positive feedback. Also some blank documents. If a project thinks it has good practices on one of the aspects in the template documents, please submit PRs. Could be a fruitful source of information.
  - John: the more knowledge the better! We can then figure out how it gets into the main tac.aswf.io web site.
- TAC Vice Chair election #1202
  - John: transition “handover of the guard”, Carol will become Chairperson, Larry will step down, looking for someone new to become vice-chair. If anyone is interested, contact Larry / Carol / John.
- 2026 Security Reviews #1137
  - John: want to do another run in 2026. Want to prioritize Graduated Stage projects, if you are such a project and are interested, even at Incubation Stage, a spot could open up. Good opportunity to improve security posture.
- Project Leads - License Scans just sent out #1212
  - Not all projects received them? John to check up.
Annual Review: OpenTimelineIO #477
- Eric Reinecke
- Slide Deck
- Slide Deck with Presenter Notes
- OpenTimeIO ASWF Project Review 2025
- Outline
  - 2025 Themes
  - Development / Contributor Ecosystem Check-in
  - 2026 Areas of Focus
- 2025 Themes
  - Modernization and cleanup of legacy code
  - Usability schema enhancements
    - Preserving user context for colors of tracks / clips
    - Good impact on timeline round tripping
  - Further maturing of Raven (the OTIO Viewer Application)
    - People moving away from legacy OTIO Viewer
- Vendor Adoption
  - Media Composer 2025.6 : released this year! (was previously beta with export only)
    - Full OTIO Import / Export
    - Avid team has been great collaborator, and signaling this is just start of story
  - Kdenlive
    - Released this year
    - Native OTIO import / export
    - Demoed round tripping with Resolve
  - OS Packages
    - Debian
    - Arch Linux
    - FreeBSD
  - CuttingRoom : Release this Year!
    - Web based NLE
    - Getting a lot of momentum, discussed in industry (NAB/IBC/HPA)
    - Gave demo to TSC, shared great feedback
    - They are excited about OTIO, path forward for timeline interchange
    - Continuing conversation about roadmap
  - OpenReview Initiative / Sync Protocol
    - Protocol for review sessions built on OTIO
    - Defines new objects via a schema plugin
    - Objects can be serialized to JSON and sent over the wire
      - send OTIO fragments to move session data
      - can capture all those things and build up ability to replay a review session based on recording these objects being transmitted
    - A nice path forward to move review and annotation data into existing context, indicates way forward for a richer integration
    - leverages unique OTIO capabilities
    - ORI Annotations GitHub repo
- High-Demand Schema Enhancements
  - Source Media Stream/Channel selection
  - Progress toward color effects
  - Spatial Transform Effects
- Contribution Health
  - Dropoff since 2022 of commits and PRs
  - Contributor leaderboard
    - Top 3 are 60% of contributions, used to be a bit more spread out
    - Might be a bit of an anomaly, Darby Johnston’s large contribution is a very large number, skewing that metric.
    - Overall contributions are up 20% (including from Darby)
    - Core devs may not have had as much time to contribute to the project
- 2026 Focus
  - Meet requirements for ASWF Adoption
  - Identify where EDL and ALE are sing being used and determine why OTIO isn’t used instead
    - We’ve eclipsed the feature set, with AVID adoption the argument for EDL and ALE should be weaker
  - Deliver Major Schema Enhancements
    - Basic Color Pipeline Modeling (CDL, LUT Reference, colorspaces)
    - Spatial Transforms
    - Input/Output Stream and Channel Mapping
    - Would like to deliver on at least 2
  - Discuss calling ourselves 1.0?
    - We’ve been public beta for a long time, not sure what’s the “emotional block”, Nick Porcino pushing for 1.0
  - May want to lean on ASWF for CI and release setup (time used up with core developers)
- For the TAC
  - Are there places we’d like to see OTIO collaborating more with other projects?
    - Discussions with OpenFX
  - Beyond focussing a bit more on dev days, are there other ideas about how to recruit more engineering contribution
    - Would like to see more engagement from NLE vendors who adopted us
    - But a lot of benefit with engagement with Autodesk / Foundry
    - But less so outside VFX
- Open Discussion
  - Carol: great presentation! Anything blocking adoption stage outside of CI? Eric: we’re 90% of the way for OpenSSF badge, but don’t remember specifics. Carol: Larry was talking about TAC best practices, is there anything you need help with and we could write into best practices guide. Make sure we answer the questions you need answered. Know where you are getting stuck / out of comfort zone.
  - Carol: this year was crazy for everyone including OTIO, got pulled into other directions for ACES 2, but would like to prioritize color aspects. OTIO should be able to talk with OCIO so people can depend on it. That would be my wish, if this is the year you think you want to address this. Eric: Doug gave us great feedback on the proposal I wrote, a lot of my year also got eaten up by ACES 2.0! Entire color ecosystem has gotten a lot clearer.
  - David: with the challenges on NLE adoption outside VFX / Animation, do you know what the roadblocks are? Eric: we’ve been successful making this case, one particular NLE vendor I’ve been talking says it may depend on user base. Would be an easier sell if we could claim to have fixed the crazy timewarp / remapping problem, that would make it a more compelling case. Some of our contributors have done great work, but not in OTIO yet. A vendor can integrate OTIO, but who is going to use it. “Build it and they will come: this is demoed in Kdenlive. Clear interop path with Resolve is helpful. But are the people paying for an NLE asking for it, that drives the demand. Demand exists on the higher end for VFX / Animation, but may not be for YouTube editors for instance.
  - David: for the timewarp features, when do you think that could be incorporated? Eric: I can’t really say, depends on the time people have to work on them. David: do you think everyone who should know about OTIO does? Is there a visibility issue? Eric: I’m pretty “obnoxious” and talk to a lot of people, I think we have pretty good visibility, we’ve put a lot of effort in trying to get adoption. We’ve hit the large headline NLEs, something which didn’t happen this year is that we didn’t deliver the schema enhancements to demonstrate new features. So we may have “failed” as a project, we haven’t demonstrated follow-on value. Hopefully we can deliver that next year.
  - Carol: you had a couple of new, big integrations this year. That’s good progress! We see these cycles on a lot of these projects, a year may not be a “full cycle”. We had that in OCIO, 2024 was a smaller release, this year was a big release. So don’t be too hard on yourself! Eric: a good point. 10 years ago I would have not have dreamt of having OTIO in Media Composer! A decade of advocacy. We have high standards for ourselves! Carol: would def want to work with you to get you over the hump to graduation. And do a 1.0 release, will help with momentum, get out of “public beta” mentality.
  - David: we should plan a marketing campaign for 1.0 release to make sure OTIO is top of mind from every vendor. Carol: NAB good time? Eric: a good idea, we can hold a funeral for EDL.

Next Meeting Agenda

General Updates
- ORI follow up on Incubation #1167