Pixar's Universal Scene Description To Be Open-Sourced

Posted by samzenpus on Monday August 10, 2015 @02:07PM from the try-it-out dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Today Pixar announced their second major open source project, Universal Scene Description. USD is the technology that enables 'hundreds of artists to operate simultaneously on the same collections of assets in different contexts', says Pixar VP of software R&D, Guido Quaroni. Pixar has been working with industry to vet the new technology, gaining backing from VFX power-houses MPC and Double Negative as well as high-end digital content creation tool creator, The Foundry. Official source release is slated for summer 2016. Pixar released its RenderMan animation and rendering suite, free back in March.

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Re:Will this fill a gap in free software? by exomondo · 2015-08-10 15:08 · Score: 1, Informative

Does this software do something that the Blender devs currently can't do (and aren't making good progress on)?
This is about allowing different applications to inter-operate by having a common scene description format, it's nothing to do with free software.

(Note: Renderman is still proprietary, it just costs nothing for a non-commercial licence. Not free software at all.)
I don't think anybody implied it was Free Software, they released it free (as in the general interpretation: "without cost") for non-commercial use.