Intellectia News

This week's Ubuntu Summit 2024 was attended by Lproven (Slashdot reader #6,030). He's also a FOSS correspondent for the Register, where he's filed this report: One of the first full-length sessions was presented by David Morin, executive director of the Academy Software Foundation, introducing his organization in a talk about Open Source Software for Motion Pictures. Morin linked to the Visual Effects Society's VFX/Animation Studio Workstation Linux Report, highlighting the market share pie-chart, showing Rocky Linux 9 with at some 58 percent and the RHELatives in general at 90 percent of the market. Ubuntu 22 and 24 — the report's nomenclature, not this vulture's — got just 10.5 percent. We certainly didn't expect to see that at an Ubuntu event, with the latest two versions of Rocky Linux taking 80 percent of the studio workstation market... What also struck us over the next three quarters of an hour is that Linux and open source in general seem to be huge components of the movie special effects industry — to an extent that we had not previously realized. There's a "sizzle reel" showing examples of how major motion pictures used OpenColorIO, an open-source production tool for syncing color representations originally developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks. That tool is hosted by a collaboration between the Linux Foundation with the Science and Technology Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the "Academy" of the Academy Awards). The collaboration — which goes by the name of the Academy Software Foundation — hosts 14 different projects The ASWF hasn't been around all that long — it was only founded in 2018. Despite the impact of the COVID pandemic, by 2022 it had achieved enough to fill a 45-page history called Open Source in Entertainment [PDF]. Morin told the crowd that it runs events, provides project marketing and infrastructure, as well as funding, training and education, and legal assistance. It tries to facilitate industry standards and does open source evangelism in the industry. An impressive list of members — with 17 Premier companies, 16 General ones, and another half a dozen Associate members — shows where some of the money comes from. It's a big list of big names. [Adobe, AMD, AWS, Autodesk...] The presentation started with OpenVBD, a C++ library developed and donated by Dreamworks for working with three-dimensional voxel-based shapes. (In 2020 they created this sizzle reel, but this year they've unveiled a theme song.) Also featured was OpenEXR, originally developed at Industrial Light and Magic and sourced in 1999. (The article calls it "a specification and reference implementation of the EXR file format — a losslessly compressed image storage format for moving images at the highest possible dynamic range.") "For an organization that is not one of the better-known ones in the FOSS space, we came away with the impression that the ASWF is busy," the article concludes. (Besides running Open Source Days and ASWF Dev Days, it also hosts several working groups like the Language Interop Project works on Rust bindings and the Continuous Integration Working Group on CI tools, There's generally very little of the old razzle-dazzle in the Linux world, but with the demise of SGI as the primary maker of graphics workstations — its brand now absorbed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise — the visual effects industry moved to Linux and it's doing amazing things with it. And Kubernetes wasn't even mentioned once. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post reports that a former Etsy CEO remodeled their home into what's known as a passive house. It's "designed to be as energy efficient as possible, typically with top-notch insulation and a perfect seal that prevents outside air from penetrating the home; air flows in and out through filtration and exhaust systems only." Their benefits include protection from pollution and pollen, noise insulation and a stable indoor temperature that minimizes energy needs. That translates to long-term savings on heating and cooling. While the concept has been around for about 50 years, experts say that the United States is on the cusp of a passive house boom, driven by lowered costs, state-level energy code changes and a general greater awareness of — and desire for — more sustainable housing... Massachusetts — which alongside New York and Pennsylvania is one of the leading states in passive house adoption — has 272 passive house projects underway thanks to an incentive program, says Zack Semke [the director of the Passive House Accelerator, a group of industry professionals who aim to spread lessons in passive house building]. Consumer demand for passive houses is also increasing, says Michael Ingui, an architect in New York City and the founder of the Passive House Accelerator... The need to lower our energy footprint is so much more top-of-mind today than it was 10 years ago, Ingui says, and covid taught us about the importance of good ventilation and filtered fresh air. "People are searching for the healthiest house," he says, "and that's a passive house...." These days, new passive houses are usually large, multifamily apartment buildings or high-end single-family homes. But that leaves out a large swath of homeowners in the middle. To widen passive house accessibility to include all types of people and their housing needs, we need better energy codes and even more policies and incentives, says In Cho, a sustainability architect, educator and a co-founder of the nonprofit Passive House for Everyone! Passive houses "can and should serve folks from all socioeconomic backgrounds," she says. Using a one-two punch of mandates for energy efficient buildings and greater awareness to the public, that increased demand for passive houses will lead to more supply, Cho says. And we're already seeing those changes in the market. Take triple-pane windows, for example, which are higher performing and more insulating than their double-pane counterparts. Even just 10 to 20 years ago, the difference in price between the two was high enough to make triple-pane windows cost-prohibitive for a lot of people, Cho says. Over the years, as the benefits of higher performing windows became more well-known, and as cities and states changed their energy codes, more companies began producing better windows. Now they're basically at price parity, she says. If we keep pushing for greater awareness and further policy changes, it's possible that all of the components of passive house buildings could follow that trend. "For large multifamily projects, we're already seeing price parity in some cases, Semke says... "But as it stands, single-family passive houses are still likely to cost a margin more than non-passive houses, he says. This is because price parity is easier to achieve when working at larger scales, but also because many of the housing policies and incentives encouraging passive house buildings are geared toward these larger projects." Read more of this story at Slashdot.