Moonray – open-source production renderer from DreamWorks | Hacker News Reader

Moonray – open-source production renderer from DreamWorks

openmoonray.org

72 pointsandsoitis16 comments

DreamWorks Animation to release MoonRay as open source - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32357470 - Aug 2022 (107 comments)

I'd love to get a look at the source code. Alas, the code is unavailable!

From the downloads page:

“We are currently preparing the packages for public release, and MoonRay will be available for download from Github soon. If you would like to be on a mailing list to receive release news and announcements about MoonRay, please sign up here.”

https://openmoonray.org/download

This HN post seems a little early then. The title of this submission doesn't even match the title of the page, which doesn't call the tool "open-source" yet.

The Joel on Software post about open source software is relevant: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

For DreamWorks, they no longer see rendering as a differentiator for them. Now they are seeing it as a cost and want to decrease the cost of rendering improvements by making it open source.

There's also an additional benefit: Making sure the software doesn't stagnate. At big tech company... open sourcing tech helps hedge against a dead-end proprietary solution.

Converting over from a dead-end proprietary solution to the industry standard does cost a lot, but it's kind of secondary to velocity.

"DreamWorks Animation announced their intent to release their proprietary production renderer, MoonRay, as open source software later this year. [...] DreamWorks intends to make MoonRay available under the Apache 2.0 license."

with a Contributor License Agreement - https://openmoonray.org/MoonRayContributorLicenseAgreement.p...

The text of the CLA in question for companies

"You agree that all Contributions to the Project made by You or by Your designated employees shall be submitted and licensed to the project under AL-2.0. You agree that You shall be bound by the terms of AL-2.0 for all Contributions made by You and Your employees. Your designated employees who are authorized to make Contributions shall be those identified by Your CLA Manager(s). You agree to identify Your initial CLA Manager(s) below and thereafter maintain current lists of employees eligible to make Contributions by providing updated lists to Moonray@dreamworks.com."

And for individuals

"Thank you for your interest in the MoonRay open source project (“Project”), which has selected the Apache License Version 2.0 (“AL-2.0”) for its inbound contributions. The terms You, Contributor, and Contribution are used here as defined in AL-2.0. The Project is required to have a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) on file that binds each Contributor. You agree that all Contributions to the Project made by You shall be submitted and licensed to the project under AL-2.0 and that You shall be bound by the terms of AL-2.0 for all Contributions made by You. Please complete this form, sign, and email a PDF file to MoonRay@dreamworks.com."

Seems fairly harmless.

DreamWorks shut down Pacific Data Images in Redwood City, a predecessor company who was arguably the source of all their whiz-bang tech

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Data_Images

Moonray started at PDI, but DreamWorks has been developing it for years and years since then. There was lots of cool tech coming from both PDI and DreamWorks-LA. As an ex-employee of PDI I certainly wouldn’t say all the tech was coming from PDI. I will say, however, that in the late 90s and early 2000s, PDI had the most amazing graphics scripting & coding environment ever, and I wish the tools and scripting language could have been open sourced. Having joined immediately after grad school, I was a kid in a candy store, it was stunning how productive and fast you could be at prototyping new ideas. Just a few examples, I wrote a caustics renderer one afternoon, and another day wrote an analytically integrating environment map light source that outlived my career there. Juan Buhler’s subsurface scattering was originally a quickie day project. In production, we’d write one-off systems for all kinds of effects sequences with fire & smoke & water & foliage. Anyway, I’m probably gushing, but I still really miss that environment and the people who made it.

What was the IP contract you had to sign like?

I just turned down a near-dreamjob because the IP language was "we own everything you make do or think, past present and future, that is related in any way whatsoever to whatever business this company conducts. You give us irrevocable power of attorney to sign off anything we need to to enforce this."

It was a small kinda lame company anyway. I'm curious what 'good' places like PDI had in contracts.

That sounds probably like standard language to me, but it depends on the exact legal language. Power of attorney sounds possibly odd, but I’m not a lawyer and haven’t seen that many employment contracts. All the employment contracts I’ve had in the US have had some sort of non-compete language and say that what you do with work time & resources is company IP. I always fret about it for a week when I’m starting a new job and then forget all about it until the next move.

You have at least a couple of options you should be aware of. First, state law overrides employment contracts (and the contracts usually say so.) Learn a little about what your state law allows and protects. Companies are free to say that anything you develop off-hours is theirs, but that doesn’t mean it’s true or legal, and often it’s not, especially in California.

Second, you can negotiate the terms of your contract, and if it’s for a place you want to work or if your side projects could or do make money, you should seriously consider it. Specifically, you can have a lawyer write up an exclusion for side projects you already have going, where the employer will sign something declaring your side project as non-competing. I’ve done this at my last 2 full time jobs, and it was worth every penny even though I wasn’t worried about my employers accusing me of anything. I was initially worried that adding roadblocks to my employment contract could scare off the employer & compromise my new job, but my experience so far is that it had the opposite effect, the employers agreed to my requests and respected me for asking and sorting it out.

Companies are just covering their butts and mostly worried about employees explicitly stealing company IP and/or company resources. If you really are doing your own thing on the side, and it’s not related to your employer’s business plans or affecting your work, then you aren’t likely to have any issues (assuming the employers are reasonable people, and most people are). Lots and lots of people at PDI had side projects, same goes for all other companies I’ve worked for in both media and tech.

Well, I asked them to change it and they wouldn't budge, so I didn't take the job. I explained my concerns and they said "oh that's not the intention of the contract" and I asked to change it to reflect the intention and they refused.

I dunno, maybe I'm just being stubborn and shot myself in the foot. But damn that contract was terrifying.

If they don’t budge and the contract wording is clearly taking ownership of your personal work, then I think you made the right choice, FWIW. My recommendation is spend a few bucks and have an employment lawyer review stuff like that. Any employer is very likely to push back on individuals, but will probably quickly back down and agree if you bring a lawyer; it tends to send a signal of seriousness. But yeah, I agree it’s a red flag if the legalese and the informal “intention” don’t seem to match.

Yeah, honestly it has been difficult to feel like I made the right decision because I hear a lot that this is standard. Unfortunately I'm flat-broke and can hardly afford a lawyer atm. I'd take the job and just deal except that the contract really does say they own some of my basic knowledge of how to do what I do, forever. Real dealbreaker.

previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32357470

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