Subdivision surfaces as implemented in RenderMan have been a thorny issue in VFX for many years. Most production facilities wind up implementing their own version of subdivision surfaces for other production tools, but still rely on Pixar's implementation for rendering. The nature of the patents in Pixar's implementation make it hard for individual facilities to match the final subdiv output, and risky to release their own open-source implementation for fear of revealing a patent dependency.

So this has been a long-time coming, and while the quality of Pixar's implementation is undoubtedly welcome, the main advantage to studios is relaxation of the patent requirement - something Pixar should have done years ago, since all anybody wanted to do with those patents was better utilize the tools they had licensed from Pixar in the first place.