DreamWorks Animation 'Shrek the Third': Linux Feeds an Ogre (Linux Journal) [LWN.net]

DreamWorks Animation 'Shrek the Third': Linux Feeds an Ogre (Linux Journal)

Posted Jun 6, 2007 21:24 UTC (Wed) by Zenith (subscriber, #24899)
Parent article: DreamWorks Animation 'Shrek the Third': Linux Feeds an Ogre (Linux Journal)

It's nice and all that they use Linux so extensively, but quotes like:

"A challenge we overcame on Shrek 3 was the integration of metadata into our pipeline", says Grant. "In a cross-team effort between R&D and Production Technology, we put in place a system that maintains historical version information, render statistics and other really valuable data in each and every file we produce. That we were able to do this shows one of the key advantages of having a proprietary toolset and file formats."

does make we wonder why they don't work more towards open file formats and sharing technology, to spread out the cost of development. They talk about lots of Perl code that they want to convert to Python, how about slowly opening up some of that, and have the community have a go at it. Some of it might be useful, most of it will likely not be.

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DreamWorks Animation 'Shrek the Third': Linux Feeds an Ogre (Linux Journal)

Posted Jun 6, 2007 22:19 UTC (Wed) by Zenith (subscriber, #24899) [Link]

If that be the case, I hastily retract my comment :)

Not a native speaker, so although quite fluent, I do misunderstand things sometimes.

English usage

Posted Jun 7, 2007 0:05 UTC (Thu) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

No, no, you're both entirely correct. The advantage the DreamWorks guy is
pleased to have is the advantage of complete freedom to define how his
software works. Which is not typically an advantage of proprietary
software you buy from somewhere *else*. It's something you get by
developing your code in-house and not supporting other users, which is
equally "proprietary".

Of course, DreamWorks gets this advantage as much by building on Free
Software components as it does through "NIH syndrome". It's a bit weird
that the guy uses this word in that context -- "in-house" would have been
the more appropriate term.

DreamWorks Animation 'Shrek the Third': Linux Feeds an Ogre (Linux Journal)

Posted Jun 7, 2007 14:26 UTC (Thu) by i3839 (subscriber, #31386) [Link]

I'm not a native speaker either, but see xoddam's comment, he's spot on.

I pointed out the "custom" or "in-house" thing to make clear that the picture isn't as grim as it might look.

As for NIH/making it a community effort: They're quite big, probably big enough to not need anyone else. Opening it all up might help others too, those others being their rivals (of course long term it helps them too, but initially it won't. And the home users have much other requirements than them). The smaller studios working more together would make more sense.