Linux goes to Hollywood

j2brown writes: " Yahoo! News has this little article about IBM taking Linux to Hollywood. " It's not a very in-depth article, but it is interesting that Big Blue is saying that Hollywood will be moving their rendering stuffs to Linux in the next 12 to 18 months. Wonder how SGI feels about that.

Comments

Render farms are great, content-creation is better

[tyrann98]

Render farms just crunch numbers and that is where Linux is succeeding. Linux on x86 (AMD or Intel) is displacing SGI not based on qualities of the Linux OS necessarily, but due to the low cost of x86 hardware, high quality compilers and free OS last. I'm sure NetBSD would be just as good is this application. Linux could even be replaced by commercial render-farm operations that run on purpose-built hardware.

SGI effectively gives away their OS and you have to pay incredible prices for their hardware. For certain applications where real-time 3D performance or high-bandwidth memory applications is required, SGI and Sun still has the tools to beat the x86 platform any day. Real workstations still have many advantages over the best PC motherboards. But all of additional cost for SGI hardware is a waste if you are just number crunching.

However, the news that IBM and Alias are developing content-creation software for Linux is a very good sign. These are the tools that every artist would be using to push pixels, and that's the way to get a huge foothold in the Hollywood. That moves Linux for the room in the back to the desktop of each artist.

Re:DVD support

[TheAwfulTruth]

This "cure" is FAR worse than the disease. :( When this kind of attitude takes over we will then truly be in tech. hell.

Re:And this is good?

[connorbd]

You have an interesting point, but you know, I think Theo De Raadt said it best regarding the licensing of OpenBSD: if you want to use it in a baby mulcher, we can't stop you anyway. Linux is not an organization; it's an operating system. The organizations involved with it are entitled to make money (if they can; they shouldn't be running to the government for help), and they're as free to do with it as they please as we are.

The fact is that you can't say, "No, you can't use it for that" when you're dealing with a GPL product. Moreover, Linux is being used in the industry by techies, many of whom probably roughly the same attitude we do towards industry lawyers. We (who is this we, kemo sabe?) can object all we want, but the truth is that there isn't a damn thing anyone can do about it, and, like it or not, that's probably the way it should be.

And all the handwringing in the world won't change that.

/Brian