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Friday, Nov 6, 2009
Who says free software is passé? Hollywood's special-effects industry can't get enough of the operating system built by hackers, for hackers.
Nov 1, 2001 | Over the past year, the information technology elite have started to dismiss Linux as a flash in the pan that tried and failed to dominate in a world owned by Windows. Woebegone Linux and open-source companies are scattered across the landscape like so much shrapnel. The stock prices of IPO high fliers VA Linux and Red Hat currently trade near half of their pre-IPO offering prices. Meanwhile, Windows XP gets the press and the plaudits.
But what's happening behind the scenes? In the early days of the open-source movement, Linux-based operating systems made their way into the business world through the back door, usually shepherded by an engineer who just wanted to get his or her job done in the most efficient way possible. That motivation hasn't disappeared, even if some of the companies that tried to capitalize on it are already distant memories. In fact, today, entire industries are making Linux-based operating systems central to their business.
Take, for example, the glamorous, and absolutely essential to modern entertainment, visual-effects industry.
Visual effects, known in industry parlance simply as VFX, are those bits of movie magic that make dragons fly and toys come alive. The companies that create those effects are end users of technology -- they don't create tools to sell for others to use. They make movies. They are technology consumers. One of the best-known members of this industry is Dreamworks Animation of Glendale, Calif.
Dreamworks' 2001 summer blockbuster "Shrek!" was rendered -- a technical term referring to the process of creating computer-generated animation -- using racks upon racks of PCs running Linux. In total more than 1,000 computers running Red Hat Linux were used in a single giant cluster, or "render farm."
"Dreamworks set an agenda two years ago," says Ed Leonard, head of Technology at Dreamworks Animation, "to migrate completely to Linux."
And Dreamworks is far from alone. Pixar and Industrial Light & Magic, two other giants in the special-effects world, are also either using Linux or investigating it. And many of the top developers of special-effects software are making sure that their products will work with Linux. It's a classic open-source success story: industry adoption not because some megacompany is pouring millions of dollars into marketing, but because the software gets the job done, cheaply and efficiently.
