Academy Software Foundation Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - April 15, 2026

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 - 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
Karen Ruggles - Diversity & Inclusion Working Group Representative
Ken Museth - OpenVDB Representative
Nick Porcino - Universal Scene Description 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 - Individual - No Account
Emily Olin - Academy Software Foundation
John Mertic - The Linux Foundation
Yarille Ortiz - The Linux Foundation

Other Attendees

Nick Cannon - Walt Disney Animation / VES Technology Committee
Olga Avramenko - Sony Imageworks / Digital Note Taking Assistant
Ben Schofield - CDSA
Aries Moczar
Cory Ormand - Walt Disney Studios
Doug Walker - Autodesk / OCIO
Jim Geduldick - Spaceboy Studios / VES Tech Committee
Jim Helman - MovieLabs
JT Nelson - Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Lornam Dumba - Framestore
Randy Packer - DreamWorks Animation
Robin Rowe - CinePaint
Sam Richards - ORI / VES Tech Committee
Sean McDuffee - Intel

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Agenda

General Updates
- Dev Days 2026 #1288
- AGENDA TOPIC SLP 2026 #1306
Linux Workstations in VFX - Wayland #1317
- WG Proposal
Revamp Annual Review Structure/Template #1336

Notes

General Updates
- Dev Days 2026 #1288
  - Olga: remember to update your issues, expected outcome of issues, promote, get people involved.
- AGENDA TOPIC SLP 2026 #1306
  - Carol: please share the email template. Deadline for applying to be a learner is Saturday, we may or may not extend it. We’re doing great so far, but we can always use volunteers.
  - Olga: Dev Days is Sept 17, so we should to VTH before that to promote Dev Days?
  - Larry: would it be an option to allow projects to decide on summer vs Sept? Projects who try Sept could then try september? Emily: could be an option, but could also be spread around the year with reviews? Carol: we benefit from having all the VTH at the same hall, otherwise we’ll see less attendance. Let’s experiment with one thing at a time? Larry: right, just didn’t want to end up with a “split”?
  - Larry: synergies to time them with big annual releases is strong. I am for it if we want to try it? Jonathan: I would +1. A lot of teams who want to present are “almost but not quite ready”, moving to september would ease that pressure for MaterialX. Carol: not every project gets to do a BoF, but how close did we come to not having room last year? Not all projects choose to do a BoF? Emily: it was close this year, had some people really early / really late. A second day adds a lot of cost. Carol: if we need to be strategic around BoFs, perhaps some projects could be combined, split a room…
- Virtual Town Hall scheduling
  - Emily: do we do it earlier to give more time to prep, do we look at Virtual Town Halls in September, and use SIGGRAPH BoFs to drive to VTH? We can’t have a BoF for every project since we are growing. If VTH get moved later, will everybody want a BoF? But if it makes more sense to do it in September to match September releases?
  - Carol: In Slack thread, SIGGRAPH is mid july this year, a whole month, puts us further out from typical project releases that align with VFX Reference Platform. Should we try to use BoFs as jumping off point, use VTH closer to releases. Don’t have to stick with it, trying different ideas.
  - Carol: unless we hear otherwise, we’ll aim for September, before Dev Days.
Linux Workstations in VFX - Wayland #1317
- WG Proposal
- Nick: presenting as chair of VES Tech Committee, also represent the VFX Platform working group. Linux has been a preferred platform in VFX and animation for over 20 years. We had a crisis when SGI / IRIX was going away, communities came together for transition to Linux. Similarly when we got “stuck” on CentOS 7, came together to choose EL 8 (RHEL, Rocky, Alma). Coming to another crisis point that we see coming and needs a moment of community action. We may have been almost too successful in recommending to move to Enterprise Linux, we were trying to promote more studios to pay for RHEL subscriptions to pay for development, but most studios are moving to downstream distributions. So Red Hat has almost no more subscriptions from VFX / Animation. Red Hat sponsors a lot of open source development for their customers. Red Hat is deprecating X11 / Xorg and moving to Wayland, starts with RHEL 10. Wayland has been around for many years, works for desktop, but not proven for pro / high end workstations and applications. Major commercial vendors haven’t done meaningful testing. This is coming at us, some members of community have reached out through SSA / VFX Platform, there is some opinions / expertise, but nothing coordinated. There’s an XWayland subsystem, but we don’t know if that’s enough. We don’t know if Wayland can support remote workflows. Color management is a question. This isn’t just about RHEL, since that flows down to Rocky / Alma. It is in our common interest for Linux to remain a viable environment. We want to propose a WG to propose a neutral space for people to convene: open source developers, studios, wayland devs, commercial software vendors. Figure out what are the issues, what are we trying to get to, and what’s the roadmap.
- JF: here is the formal WG proposal
- Questions? Christopher Moore: ASWF in best position to handle this. Carol: appreciate the work to scope it like it is. Also keep timeframe in goal, fits the WG model. We’re not in crisis yet but we see it coming. Are you looking at people you are looking to be involved? Anyone specifically you want to get involved? Nick: we may not have gotten to that point, JF is a good bridge between groups, we’re still working on who would be involved, who would lead it.
- John: The LF can also help with relationship building to any relevant projects as it makes sense
- Larry: people on this call may need to go back to their respective orgs and figure out who would need to be involved. Nick: sometimes it’s not an obvious person. It’s part of the infrastructure we’ve relied on for 20 years. Less aimed at the sysadmin / build engineers, more at software developers, people who would port from one display system to another. From large vendor DCCs, it’s a big deal for them. Hopefully can bring not just the studio community, but also hopefully people from Wayland, GNOME / KDE… Carol: need software engineers on DCC side, and sysadmins on studio side. For Remote Desktop, Color Management… Nick: maybe a chance to educate Linux software engineers about the needs of our community, including post production, color grading…
- Sam: we may be forced into coding part of the underlying systems, device drivers… We don’t know what the issues will be. We may not just be at the high level, we may need to dig into Wayland. Nick: we don’t know if it’s there or not there.
- Larry (chat): I’ve literally been using XWindows since the late 80s. It’s hard to even wrap my mind around what needs to be addressed if it changes. It’s the water we swim in, so it’s invisible.
- Sean McDuffee: passed it on to Linux middleware folks, we have someone who can support, our Wayland support is significantly better than our X11 support. Nick: thanks!
- Carol: I much prefer this timing of trying to get ahead of the issue.
- JT (chat): Ya, O3DE is moving to Wayland for Linux and there’s key challenges we’ve been finding in addition to what Nick said. Mainly at the moment is Qt 6 version needed and decorations and a few other things. I can join the group on behalf of O3DE It has some advantages also in HDR, so there’s also some excellent advantages in making this transition. Correct @ multiple SMEs
- Carol: we’ll put it to LFX vote, thank you!
Revamp Annual Review Structure/Template #1336
- Board level discussions on how to track project progress
- Larry, John and I chatted, an action item is to update the template on the annual review template. We’ve had this template on TAC website, but a lot of us don’t use it, what could we use to try to “normalize”, add what isn’t in annual reviews that would be useful.
- Carol: started to modify on annual review template
- Consider the template a minimum set of requirements, feel free to add things that aren’t in the template for your review.
- New: Roadmap. Every project should have one. Not going to define what should be on the roadmap. Want to track high level project goals, and track how well you did on the previous year’s goals. Talk about what happened, what didn’t, and why. This isn’t a score / grade, just information. This should be especially expected of graduated projects.
- New: Incubation Project review criteria. Is your project ready to “level up”. You don’t have to include all the bullet points in your presentation, use it to see if you want to discuss with your TSC to move from sandbox to incubation…
- Contributions: need to improve LFX, so we need to try to use it for our use cases. Please use LFX Insight, tell us if the data is bad.
- New: VFX Industry Build Matrix Updates. Hard to keep spreadsheets up to date asynchronously is hard, but will ask to update this at annual review time to update the VFX Industry Build Matrix Updates and the Engineering Contributions spreadsheet. May do specific callouts of what we’re looking for in those updates. Of course if you want to update more than once a year, that’s great.
- New: CI / Security / Marketing Updates: lots of projects already do this, but we are formalizing this.
- “Key Achievements” slide should be covered in roadmap slide. Focus is operational project health, not about your latest release, even though we want to hear a few high level points about this. Try to keep focussed on project health is the goal. Will also update the language about annual review.
- WGs are not covered: wanted to make it a separate template, but want feedback. We’re starting to run out of time to do annual reviews, want to do no more than one per TAC meeting. Starting to run out of TAC meeting slots. We’re not at the sky is falling stage yet, but we’re starting to see it happen. One idea is that WGs are different, they may not need a lot of the same structure, trying to do one or two TAC meetings where all the WGs are doing their annual reviews, shorter, consolidated presentations (10-15 minutes). Only stick point would be to separate Long Term WGs from Short Term WGs?
- Cary: could be in the optional part, but hearing about projects where they are in their AI coding journey, are you seeing submissions, are you using it? Related to security, had interesting experience this morning. Had 3 MaterialX vulns filed against OpenEXR repo, not sure where it came from. Jonathan: we got those same reports, they might have gotten moved. Larry: all the projects have been getting higher than background rate of security reports, possibly tied to ease of people finding vulnerabilities using AI tools. There are problems and bugs we need to fix, but there’s been a noticeable uptick. Carol: OCIO has gotten them as well. Stephen: supposedly LFX has been given some Mythos tokens for security analysis? Perhaps some of that is coming from there? Larry: that could be a way for us to shore up some of those issues. Stephen: maybe our security audits can become “can we get Mythos tokens”, could be more efficient than professional audit. Cary: if you are getting security reports and haven’t dealt with those before, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. Carol: like I did? Cary: I’ve finally settled into a pattern on how to deal with those. I can come up with a short report for the TAC repo on how to deal with those.
- Stephen (chat): Anecdotally, I noticed a much higher rate of CVEs in the pip ecosystem lately being raised, and often in projects that barely tend to get touched, long-standing projects that have been around for a very long time. (Over the past 1-3 months maybe)
- Cary: GitHub security reporting infrastructure is great. Freeform mechanism of email is harder to deal with. All projects should enable the security vulnerability report mechanism on their repo. Larry: should be turn off security@openexr.org ? Cary: do you want to make it as easy as possible? 3 years ago I would have said yet, not so sure anymore. Encouraging everyone to go through the standard mechanism is a good idea. Carol: also prefer it to random email going to random inbox. OCIO needs to update its SECURITY.md Cary: a year ago something happened to that email, someone mailed a vuln to it and we never got it.
- John (chat): OpenSSF recommends leaning on GitHub predominately, but also allowing email as a fallback. The larger maintainer guide is also a good read.
- Carol: any concerns to these templates? I don’t want to be too prescriptive, it’s a base, not a max. Still want review to be unique to each project.
- JF: what about WGs that are almost projects (like CI)? Carol: LTWG may have more to report, they should have a roadmap, same to a project. Community engagement, Slack channels, are you getting contributors. Maybe even some LFX Insights that could be pulled. WGs would be more free form, WGs should use their discretion about what slides are applicable.

Next Meeting Agenda

General Updates
- 2026 Security Reviews #1137
- AGENDA TOPIC: AI code assistant policy #1195
- TAC Industry Representative Election #1291
Annual Review: Machine Learning WG #1029
Annual Review: Rez #492
2026 TAC Priorities #1208