Academy Software Foundation Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Meeting - May 13, 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

Olga Avramenko - Sony Imageworks / DNA
JT Nelson - Pasadena Open Source consortium / SoCal Blender group
Lee Kerley - Apple
Jim Geduldick - Spaceboy Labs
Jim Helman - MovieLabs
Cory Omand - Pixar
Doug Walker - Autodesk / OCIO
Felipe Viana Lacerda

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
- Dev Days 2026 #1288
- AGENDA TOPIC SLP 2026 #1306
Annual Review: OpenCue #495

Notes

General Updates
- AGENDA TOPIC: AI code assistant policy #1195
  - Carol: open PR on the “development philosophy”, renamed as per Larry feedback. “AI coding policy”, but the only policy is that you must put the “Assisted-By:” tag. Now is the time for last looks by TAC, otherwise will merge later today.
  - PR Link
- Dev Days 2026 #1288
  - Olga: Dev Days is tomorrow, please post to your Slack channels
  - 2 in person events, one in LA, one in Vancouver, details in #devdays channel
  - Dev Days team is here to help, excited to get this going!
  - Carol: previous years we gave projects a heads up, did we do this this year? Emily: can pull that info (people who registered and expressed interest in specific projects). Carol: helps projects to see what to expect.
- AGENDA TOPIC SLP 2026 #1306
  - Karen: expect to see emails soon. A large percentage interested in rendering and software engineering. 1 person who we thought was in China is going to be in US, but we have Australia, Morroco, Brazil, Canada. Our mentors can support the timeones, only a couple of hours off in most cases. Thank you to everyone who volunteered!
- Open Source Days
  - Emily: CFP Open until May 24
  - Will push Virtual Town Halls to September
  - But will have full day of BoFs, please don’t submit directly to SIGGRAPH, we will submit as a whole to SIGGRAPH, we reserve a room and a whole day. Spreadsheet coming soon.
Annual Review: OpenCue #495
- Diego Tavares da Silva
- Slide Deck
- OpenCue Project Review 2026
- TSC
  - Diego Tavares
  - Ramon from SPI
  - Jimmy from Ghost VFX
- Agenda
  - Last Year Review
  - …
- Rendered on OpenCue
  - Goat
  - K-Pop
  - Hail Mary
- Last Year Review
  - CueNIMBY : workstation system tray tool
  - cuecmd: simplified cmd executor, not meant for complete jobs
  - New website with complete documentation opencue.io
  - Event-driven monitoring stack
  - CueWeb LDAP authentication
  - Full stack sandbox deployment
    - Single docker-compose file, all the modules and database. Makes it a lot easier to experiment with, or can customize for production. Everything running with a single command.
  - RQD Windows support
    - Used to be Windows and Mac only, now support Windows fully. Used to have a “hacky” way, but now a single executable, new in last release.
  - Rust RQD became official
    - Complete rewritten, replaces Python based RQD. Used to be the weakest part, and most fragile. Battle proven in production, over 3000 hosts. Not maintaining the Python one anymore.
  - RSS/PSS memory measurement
    - On Linux distribution processes using the same DCCs can share memory, can now monitor this. See how much memory a frame is using, but also how much memory shared between jobs. So a more accurate view of memory.
- Community Overview
  - Healthy
  - 40% more contributors
  - Still rely on 2 contributors, and one organization
  - More PRs, 8%, expected more with AI code generation.
  - Closing PRs at similar rate to being opened.
  - Improved time to merge, around 3 days, was an issue with retention for the project, encourages people to keep contributing. We pick up PRs in less than a day, finish review in less than 2 days. Helps to keep level of engagement with project.
  - More popular: more stars, more folks, more people asking in Slack channels, on LinkedIn. Since last SIGGRAPH when Deadline 10 was announced to go into Maintenance mode at last SIGGRAPH. OpenCue now a migration option. Deadline Cloud requires paying to render on your own hosts, maybe that’s a reason for more interest in OpenCue?
  - We want more users, but also active contributors.
  - Number of active orgs has increased quite a bit.
  - But still 2 contributors / 1 organization responsible for most of the contributions. Need to see this changing. Companies can start using OpenCue, will participate at the beginning, but unable to contribute back. Not sure what we can do about that, would like to see this change. It should be possible to contribute back.
- Forecast
  - Goals
    - New distributed scheduler. Improve performance and allow custom booking modes
    - Overhaul Qt based GUI (new weakest link after RQD rewrite) to make it more modern and reactive. Takes 10 seconds to refresh, users think the farm is slow, but it’s just the interface.
    - LLM support to explain log files. Studios are using either external or local LLMs. Want to allow users to provider their own keys. If an artist job fails, looking at the logs can be tricky. LLMs can be pretty good at parsing those, for instance finding a missing file, or an out of memory condition.
    - Insights feature to allow inspecting unbooked frame. Explain why a job isn’t being picked up, for instance the job is asking for constraints which can’t be satisfied.
- Q&A
  - Carol: a few things you would like to see better, but anything ASWF / TAC could do? Diego: what we do with DevDays and SIGGRAPH beings a lot of interest, a lot of people reached out to me after SIGGRAPH. But usually communication dies after SIGGRAPH. Not sure how to track which companies use our projects. Sometimes a year later we learn that they have been using it in production. Keep track of which studios are using OpenCue would help. Carol: somewhat different than other projects, since it’s an ‘end product’, a lot of these studios possibly just doing quick fixes. In OCIO we can see if an application uses OCIO.
  - JF: we should have a “one sheet” to explain how it is easy to contribute to ASWF projects. Also really excited about the “why” features.
  - Diego: for the problem of not being able to contribute, I think they have trouble even having people consider using open source projects that are “off the shelf”. They can fork for their changes, but to contribute back, they need to go through a project. A single sheet on how to contribute would be great. Carol: something we can work on, most of it is targeted at member companies, if there are companies which are not member companies, we should try to bring them on! We would like to know why it’s hard for them to contribute. This is exactly what we want out of these kinds of review.
  - Filipe: first time on the TAC. A friend told me about OpenCue, happy to have found ASWF.
  - Larry: you mentioned people who have forks and not upstream them. Are they making changes and not sending them, or do you not know. Diego: two companies using OpenCue, one of them has a very large farm, 300K cores! They are not a VFX studio. They had to make changes, they will surface the changes at the meeting, but can’t contribute back. That happened before with another company, they weren’t able to contribute back. Once something works well, people may stop attending the meetings. The Rust rewrite of RQD gets rid of old forks, adding interesting new features and progressing the project forces forks to merge back / find ways to contribute. It’s easier to fork and make your own changes, rather than trying to stay compatible. Every studios tends to work their own way, so they may customize OpenCue, but in a way that’s hard to merge back. We had similar problems at Imageworks. Maybe work to be done to make it easier to make changes compatible between everyone else.
  - Carol: I’m sure you are working on how to keep configuration separate from the core. But it’s an important effort. Larry: are the parts people want to customize, can they be compartmentalized, or maybe make a plugin system? Diego: in certain modules yet, easy to implement a feature under a feature flag. But if you make changes to the core scheduler, that can be hard. Trying to make it more portable, allow choosing different schedulers. There’s work we need to do in order to make it easier to choose configurations.
  - Carol: if someone does need to make a change to the core, hopefully you can be more confident that it is worth upstreaming and that others will want it.
  - Carol: any other feedback you have for ASWF / TAC, things we could be doing better? Diego: things are working great, TAC has the right level of involvement, without having to stay on top of too many things. AI requirements aren’t just coming from the top, we discussed it ourselves. Carol: please stay in touch around the 2 companies you mentioned. Hopefully once people are part of the TSC, they feel more involved. Encourage you to add to the TSC. Don’t be shy about asking!
  - David: it’s a great update, would like to encourage presenting at Open Source Days a short presentation about OpenCue, on your third slide you had movies which used OpenCue, could be good to have a presentation to have a presentation on how open source projects where used on a specific movie, like K-Pop. There are a few weeks to present a proposal for SIGGRAPH. There’s a lot there that could be interesting for SIGGRAPH audience! Diego: will be at SIGGRAPH, would like to present all the open source contributions, maybe on K-Pop.
  - JT (Chat): OpenCue may benefit from adopting more “composability” features in modularity to get the flexibility Diego is talking about. At O3DE we are engaging it more deeply in our modular framework to be able to align with oUSD’s composition arc and layer composability features as we integrate it.

Next Meeting Agenda

General Updates
- 2026 Security Reviews #1137
- TAC Industry Representative Election #1291
Revamp Annual Review Structure/Template #1336
2026 TAC Priorities #1208