Open Source Creative

We start with some sad[-ish] news… well sad for me. I haven’t been able to attend any conferences or shows so far this year and, with the possible exception of All Things Open in October, it’s not likely that I’m going to be able to attend any others later in the year. But my disappointment is a treat for you, dear listener! For now I get to extol the virtues of attending conferences and dig in to a few that I really like to attend.

In fact, here’s a quick list (roughly in the order I mention them in the show… also, I’ve put a star next to my favorites):

Also… I didn’t mention it in the show, but I actually really enjoy giving talks and workshops at conferences. In fact, if you’re reading this and you happen to be involved with organizing a conference, please give me a shout. I’d love to attend and speak at it.

But what about you? What events do you like to attend? Why do you attend them? What do you do when you’re there? Let me know in the comments section. I definitely want to know.

As creatives, we do have some nice open formats to work with. SVG, ODT, PNG, OpenRaster, EPUB, and Alembic (to name a few). And there are some gray area formats that, while they’re not open, they’re ubiquitous and they’ve been around long enough that folks have made open source tools for reading and writing these formats. I’m looking at you, DOC, PDF, and OBJ. But there are some file formats that can only be opened by one particular program and there’s no viable interchange format. These are pain points.

Interestingly enough, most of these tools are right smack in the middle of your creative toolchain. Sure, as a sound designer, your input is often raw PCM audio in WAV format and your output can be anything from WAV (again) to AAC or FLAC or even MP3. But on your active edit, what have you got? Friggin’ ProTools… and a daisy-chained nest of dongles to go with it. And it’s not limited to audio. We see the same thing in print design, animation (2D and 3D), visual effects, and video editing.

This is a problem, and not just for open source creatives. Anyone who wants to migrate their workflow from one tool to another is faced with this problem. And worse, there’s not always a clear and viable solution or alternative. Folks get stuck to a tool not just from familiarity with its quirks, but by the fact that it doesn’t play nice with others.

So what do we do about it? To be honest… I’m a little concerned that there’s not much that we can do, outside of using open source tools and evangelizing open formats where ever they exist. Is there something I’m missing? Some other solution that’s just sitting out there, waiting to be noticed?

I’m open to suggestions.

I detail a lot of different options in this show (after a bit of a venting about forum spambots… grrr). Here’s the basic rundown of what I looked into and what I ultimately decided upon:

So Vym seems to be the winner for me. At least it does so far. I’ve migrated quite a few of my project mind maps to it and aside from cleaning up HTML tags (I don’t think it imported 100% cleanly from the .mm format), it’s been a pleasant and hassle-free experience. I’ll let you all know more if I stumble across anything interesting as I continue to use Vym.

Now… if I could just figure out the proper way to pronounce it.

What about you? Are you using mind maps? Which one is your favorite?

There are, of course, a few rough spots in my workflow that I’d love to have ironed out a bit more. I step through those in more detail and describe a bit more what I’d like to see. But all in all, I’m pretty happy with the process and workflow that I’ve put together. Here’s a quick rundown, list style:

Of course, if you’re more aligned to the single-application workflow (like Scrivener in the closed source world) there are some open source writing tools that may be more your speed. Have a look at Bibisco and Plume Creator. Although I’ve never seriously used either of these, I know of some folks that really like them. There’s a nice article about the Bibisco over on Opensource.com.

Whew. That was a lot of writing. It’s almost like I enjoy doing that!

What do you use for your writing? Got any suggestions? Got any questions on what I use? Let me hear it down in the comments.

And, yes, I’m a week late with this episode. I know. And I’m sorry. I do, however, hopefully have good reasons (or acceptable ones). For one, I co-authored an Opensource.com article with venerable Ben Cotton on dealing with hater culture online… particularly when it comes to getting feedback. The article is called Hater’s Gonna Hate: 7 ways to deal with criticism and it got some pretty choice feedback, I’d say.

Also related to Opensource.com, I had the honor of recording last weeks Top 5 video. Just a little thing that highlights the 5 most popular stories of the previous week. It was definitely a lot of fun to produce. I’ll probably do it again.

Speaking of doing things again, I also participated in a 72-hour horror film race over the weekend. It’s been a while since I’ve done a weekend film challenge like that. I was doing some simple visual effects (rotoscoping and paint-over) for this piece and I’ve gotta say that I kind of miss doing these things. Mayhaps I’ll step into doing them again more regularly.

But, this episode is about none of that! This episode is about software naming. We have programs like Blender, Krita, Kdenlive, Natron, and (of course) GIMP. I’ve even seen Mastodon get heat for its naming. The thing is… does naming really matter all that much?

After talking [to myself] through this episode… I’m inclined to think that it doesn’t. And, if you listen to the episode, I may or may not have suggested that I would be OK with using a program called “Kitten Puncher.”

Because, really, if it matters at all, the name of a piece of software only matters at the beginning… that time before people start using it. After that, it’s all about the program’s functionality, how it actually works, and how suitable it is for doing the job at hand.

That’s what I think at least. What about you?

Oh, the umbrage! This whole thing got kicked off by a tweet from Johnathan Williamson about CG Cookie’s updated Intro to Blender course. There was an immediate response stating that “literally no one in the industry uses Blender.”

That’s wrong on so many different levels.

But I don’t really want to single out the person who made that reply… he’s not the only person out with that completely misguided perspective. I prefer to think of him as an evidential data point that indicates that we haven’t been doing a good enough job of explaining exactly why thinking like that is wrong and, quite frankly, ignorant. It’s a perspective born from being locked in the bubble of one’s own experience and then making the mistake of extrapolating too far with that anecdotal experience to (something open source folks get accused of all the time).

It’s a very human thing to do. But it’s infuriating that some humans continue to stay steadfast in misguided opinions like these despite being presented with evidence to the contrary. So I rant.

When people refer to “the industry” as it pertains to computer graphics (and specifically 3D computer graphics), they’re generally referring to one of the entertainment sectors (video games, movies, television). But there are so many other exciting and interesting places where computer graphics is used every day… at least as big as the entertainment industries. All of them have different requirements, workflows, and toolchains. More importantly, they don’t have the same track record of taking artists for granted that we’ve seen in entertainment.

But I hope it’s not just a rant. I hope that this week’s show is also a means of sharing and actively helping unseat this mistaken belief that quite a few people still have. With any luck, you can help do it with less profanity than I do.

For a long, long time we’ve heard pretty regularly that one of the appealing things about open source software development is that it’s a “meritocracy”. That is, solutions are evaluated on their own merits and the best solution always wins. However, I’m not sure that I think that’s really an accurate description of what really goes on in open source development. In fact, I think it’s a lot more like many successful creative collaborations out there. An idea tends to win because there’s a person there… and not just as an advocate, but as someone willing to do something. To write code. To create documentation. To design an interface.

In most cases, authority is ceded to whomever has the most passion for a given idea. And in scenarios where passion is roughly equivalent between parties, that’s where forks happen.

At least, that’s how I see it. I go into a bit more detail in the episode, but I’m really curious what you think about this notion. Do I have it right? Am I just stating the obvious? Am I way off-base?

Also, if we assume that this is the current state of things, is that the most desirable state? Should we be pushing for something else? I kind of like the idea of a passionocracy. Historically, I’d say it’s tended to yield pretty positive results. What do you think?

Also, at the end of the show I mention that I’ve started trying out Mastodon, a social network that’s a bit like Twitter, except it’s free, open source, and decentralized. I’m still feeling my way around there, but if you want to connect with me, I’m @[email protected] (of course).

Basically, I’d like to question the—generally agreed-upon—impression that open source tools are in competition with their closed source counterparts. I’m not entirely convinced that they are… that we are. I mean, there’s no doubt that some of the people who make closed source tools consider similar open source applications as competitors, but I think those people are largely in the minority, at least by population. By influence, perhaps that’s a different story. If the decision makers in a company (or a community, for that matter) think that competition is taking place, then the rest of the organization tends to follow suit.

That said, I don’t think it’s beneficial to either party to consider open source tools as competition. To borrow a term I’ve heard bandied about in indie writer and self-publishing communities, it’s more of a “coop-etition” thing… or at least, it ought to be. So many open source tools fit a specific need within a larger pipeline… even a “Swiss Army chainsaw” like Blender. Interoperability is of critical importance. Sadly, due to some of the licensing decisions made by closed source companies, that interoperability and collaboration is made much more difficult.

My little April Fools’ joke points to one way of trying to solve the issue. What kind of solutions—regardless of how outlandish—do you think could work?

Bonus Episode! All will be explained upon watching this video:

For years and years, it’s been a common refrain that it’s entirely impossible for an individual to influence the development of closed source software like we can in the open source world. It turns out that isn’t entirely true. It is possible to drive the development of proprietary tools. All it takes is money.

Every year around this time we see alarming stories about companies like Autodesk or Adobe “buying” Blender and doing unpleasant things like changing licenses or only offering BaaS (Blender as a Service) by way of their cloud subscription services. Fortunately, that’s not possible.

However, why have we never stopped to consider the reverse scenario?

Autodesk is a publicly traded company. With enough shares of Autodesk stock, anyone can be an influential driver of the decisions that Autodesk makes. It doesn’t take much. Case in point: for the past two years, Autodesk has been struggling—ahem, negotiating—with “activist investors” with just a 5% stake in the company.

So, based on that, I’m launching a 1-day campaign to purchase an influential share of Autodesk stock on behalf of the Blender community! I don’t think we’d need a full 5%. By all accounts, even a 1% stake in the company would be enough to make things interesting. Think of it! We could get a Blender interaction mode in Maya and 3DSMax. Right-click select everywhere! FBX could be relicensed to be GPL-friendly. Hell, maybe we could even get the source code to Softimage (may it rest in peace).

Autodesk’s market capitalization is about USD $18.7 billion. So for our 1% share, all it will take is just $200,000,000. For just two hundred million dollars, Autodesk users can almost have the same kind of benefits that we get for free with Blender. Let’s do this!

Find more details at avoidtheinternet.today.

(Of course, we could also just keep using and developing Blender and enjoy the benefits of open source software like we’ve already been doing for over ten years. I guess that’s also something we could do.)