AMD Joins The Academy Software Foundation, Open Shading Language Becomes Hosted Project

Some news that went seemingly unreported at large this month until stumbling across it... AMD has joined the Academy Software Foundation as a premier member. This joint initiative between the Linux Foundation and Academy of Motion Picture Arts is focused on pushing open-source software through the motion picture and content creation industries. Additionally, the Open Shading Language has become a new hosted project under the Academy Software Foundation.

AMD has joined the Academy Software Foundation as a premier member for pushing open-source in this industry. AMD joins the likes of The Walt Disney Studios, Sony Pictures, Red Hat, Pixar, NVIDIA, Netflix, Microsoft, Intel, Epic Games, Google Cloud, and others backing this foundation.

With AMD's interest, they are certainly interested in seeing more EPYC and Threadripper CPUs and Radeon Pro hardware used by content creators.

The academy also announced the same day that the Open Shading Language has become their sixth project. This Sony-backed shading language for VFX and animation will now be developed via this open-source foundation. Those unfamiliar with OSL can learn more -- including where it's currently supported and the numerous films already having made use of it -- via GitHub.

Besides OSL, the other projects currently under the Academy Software Foundation umbrella are OpenVDB for efficient storage and manipulation of sparse volumetric data discretized on three-dimensional grids, OpenTimelineIO as an API/interchange format for editorial timeline information, OpenEXR as the HDR raster file format, and OpenCue as a render management system.

More details on the foundation's latest work at ASWF.io.