<story><title>DreamWorks Animation to release MoonRay as open source</title><url>https://www.awn.com/news/dreamworks-animation-release-moonray-open-source</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>miohtama</author><text>Would be interesting to know what business considerations lead to the decision to open source MoonRay.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thebeardisred</author><text>DreamWorks Animation (aka DWA) is a huge advocate of open source.&lt;p&gt;Over the years they&amp;#x27;ve bankrolled a lot of development around Linux on the desktop and have one of the most astonishing NFS infrastructures I&amp;#x27;ve ever directly layed hands on.&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;ve talked about their love of open source over the years, especially at Red Hat summit.&lt;p&gt;(I spent quite a bit of time working with them and their former CTO is currently a teammate of mine).</text></comment>
<story><title>DreamWorks Animation to release MoonRay as open source</title><url>https://www.awn.com/news/dreamworks-animation-release-moonray-open-source</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>miohtama</author><text>Would be interesting to know what business considerations lead to the decision to open source MoonRay.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>erichocean</author><text>Even small companies can create competitive high-end renderers today so it&amp;#x27;s not much of a differentiator. Filmmaking is about human talent mostly, not technology. (Same thing happened in live-action filmmaking, anyone can afford the equipment today.)&lt;p&gt;But there&amp;#x27;s a huge advantage to being the &lt;i&gt;first&lt;/i&gt; high-end renderer to go open source, so lots of small studios will adopt it if it&amp;#x27;s as solid as it looks.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;ll become available in Blender.&lt;p&gt;Maintenance will then get extended to the community, including (most likely) support for alternate shading schemes (MaterialX&amp;#x2F;Lama has decent momentum right now, converging with Sony&amp;#x27;s OpenShadingLanguage).&lt;p&gt;Apache 2.0 is an ideal license for this kind of project.</text></comment>