Considering OCIO --> ASWF

[Larry Gritz]

Hey, everybody. We're thinking about applying to turn OpenColorIO governance over to the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF), and they are very enthusiastically seeking our application. Before we get that underway, I want to make sure there's a chance here to air any reservations or objections so that we can move forward with a high degree of community consensus, and to answer any questions you may have about the process.

ASWF got a lot of publicity at SIGGRAPH, so I'm going to presume you all know its significance and relevance to us and the basic value proposition. But do speak up if you want more explanation, and I'm happy to expand on it.

I think there are several reasons why turning over governance to ASWF is good for this project:

(1) It emphasizes that OCIO really is a work of and for the VFX community as a whole and shouldn't be thought of as an "Imageworks project", especially in light of the new infusion of contributions from Autodesk and elsewhere. Having it be underneath the foundation's umbrella should be a help to adoption and contributions, versus continuing to be thought of as belonging to one studio.

(2) There are a variety of licensing, legal, and other issues that will be nice to turn over to a neutral party that likely can manage it better, and can do so with close coordination and uniformity with other projects in the ecosystem.

(3) It lets us use the shared infrastructure and engineering support from LF for continuous integration, artifact archival (i.e. compiled release binaries people can directly download and install!), and release management tasks, that are being coordinated and dedicated to ASWF projects. (That's where a lot of the money from the corporate members is going.)

(4) The corporate members not only fork over the $$, they also have to pledge a certain amount of engineering effort to open source. The first couple years (when there is a paucity of ASWF projects), it can go to any project that seems important in the ecosystem, but eventually it will be tightened and fulfilling the engineering obligations of the members will be expected to be dedicated as much as possible to ASWF projects. So by being an official ASWF project, OCIO is more likely to be the recipient of that engineering effort.

(5) OCIO has, to be honest, had some periods when it lacked a strong and consistent leadership, design direction, and implementation contributions. It's pretty healthy right now, but being part of this organization I think is also insurance for the future, to help us with organization, resources, and coordination if and when needed or in times of crisis.

If we go ahead with this, on a day-to-day basis, not much would change. The open source license we use (BSD) would remain the same. The copyrights would continue to be held by the individual authors or their companies. There might be a new CLA (or equivalent), perhaps a common one for all ASWF projects, and maintained by them rather than by Imageworks. Maybe the official canonical repo would eventually move from imageworks to the AcademySoftwareFoundation account on GitHub? But the same developers would work in the same way, the same people would have commit privileges, our process for developing and setting the design and engineering direction would remain as before, all by the same people. There's no micromanagement from above; the healthy projects run their own communities, unless they need help. There might be a more formal notion of a technical steering committee for the project, with the organization helping to facilitate the stakeholders staying in contact. An accepted project gets to elect a representative to the overall ASWF Technical Advisory Committee. I think that covers all the bases of what we'd see on the ground.

I want to emphasize that we haven't made the formal application yet, the ASWF has not yet accepted the project (though since they have solicited our application, our odds are good), and also Sony Imageworks (the current owner/sponsor) has not yet formally committed to the change in governance. But before proceeding further on any of those fronts, I want to make sure this is aligned with the goals and sentiments of the OCIO stakeholders.

Questions or discussion? Pros/cons as you see it?

--
Larry Gritz
l...@larrygritz.com / l...@imageworks.com

[Steve Agland]

Thumbs up from me. Another reason I see is that in my mind the Academy's ACES config is now the de facto "reference implementation" for OCIO and it makes sense to have them living closer together.

Steve

[Haarm-Pieter Duiker]

Two thumbs up. OCIO is a great candidate for the services and standardization that the AWSF will provide.

HP

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[Sean Looper]

My only concerns are around the general benefits of having a single, production-focused sponsor (SPI in this case). As Larry alluded to, there are pros and cons to a single sponsor, the greatest con in my mind being the potential for fits and starts being tied solely to that sponsor. The major benefit, as I think we've seen with projects like OpenEXR, Alembic, USD and others is an authoritarian focus on a single, owner-centric goal. I don't necessarily need convincing of AWSF governance for OCIO given its sometimes aimless history since Jeremy moved on but I would like to hear how AWSF plans to avoid design/development by committee and the tendency that such a strategy has to fall short of the mark. 

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[Larry Gritz]

On Sep 23, 2018, at 12:28 PM, Sean Looper <sean....@gmail.com> wrote:

 I would like to hear how AWSF plans to avoid design/development by committee and the tendency that such a strategy has to fall short of the mark. 

ASWF is not involved in the design or development per se.

It's *us* who avoids design by committee, if that's what we want.

In the process of being accepted, we (as a community) would need to establish a charter that lays out our procedures. They are happy to accept a benevolent dictator, or a committee, or whatever else we want that would seem to work. We need to decide how to proceed.

To clarify, here are some things ASWF can do for us:

* Be a neutral party to hold assets like the domain, trademarks, etc., as well as encourage usage and contributions by making it a shared industry project rather than having the appearance of "ownership" by one studio.

* Shield us from liability by holding each project in its own LLC, legally distinct from any of us, our companies, or other projects.

* Provide and share some infrastructure and expertise, including some of the painful nuts and bolts related to CI, porting, testing, release engineering.

* Help direct toward this project the engineering contribution obligations of the premier member companies.

* Help coordinate communication with other projects and copies in the ecosystem, and help us get organized if we again fall into some period of disorganization.

It's worth also pointing out that ASWF is not some mysterious council of alien overlords. It literally *is* us, with its governance and technical direction set by the same companies that have been involved in using and building OCIO all along -- Dreamworks, Autodesk, DNeg, Disney, Sony (er, any day now, really), etc.

--

Larry Gritz

l...@larrygritz.com

[Sean Looper]

I didn't realize how much I wanted a mysterious council of alien overlords until you said we weren't getting one. ;)

That all sounds great, Larry. Thanks for the clarification. Within the ASWF structure I hope to see continued leadership from you and others who have helped propel OCIO forward. It sounds like a win for everyone involved if all goes to plan.

[Kevin Wheatley]

On Sun, Sep 23, 2018 at 11:58 AM, Steve Agland <sag...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thumbs up from me. Another reason I see is that in my mind the Academy's ACES config is now the de facto "reference implementation" for OCIO and it makes sense to have them living closer together.
>

Whilst I agree with the reasoning, I think it is better to be clear
that there is no hard commitment for the ACES work to be moved under
ASWF, there was discussion about this at the ACES next BoF but I got
the feeling that people thought the ASWF was emphasizing the Software
side of things for the moment and ACES covers larger concerns, and
thus was a 'not yet'.

That said the last ASWF TAC meeting did bring up discussion over none
software artefacts.

Also to add to Larry's point about who is/would be driving things, you
can find out yourself by simply participating in the public calls (I
just listen in).

Kevin

[Sebastian Sylwan]

Thumbs firmly up from me as well. 

FWIW, OCIO was one of the case studies that the VES Tech committee brought to the ASWF discussion as deep dive examples, so the ASWF structure was in a way biased to address what was identified as useful to these projects (as many of you already know).  

S

[Francois Lord]

I'm all for it. OCIO has become an essential part of the VFX world and
making sure its development will continue in a healthy fashion is
important, in my opinion.

I'm very happy to hear this.

Francois

[David Wortley]

Having CI for Windows Builds would be amazing to have!