 I'm your host Sopran Bhartya and my next guest is once again, Chris Eniscek, CTO of CNC and VP of Developer Relations at the Linux Foundation. Chris, it's great to see you after such a long time. Yeah. No, it's been a while. Good to catch up on things. Yeah. And so much has been happening, is happening at the Linux Foundation and one thing that we are going to talk about today is the newly announced Open 3D Foundation. It's something close to my heart because I am also a very avid gamer. Xbox, Citizax, PS5, Nintendo Switch, whatever VR. I have like all the VR headsets. So I was looking forward to this announcement. So I want to start with what is the basic idea behind this foundation? Sure. So, you know, like all open source foundations, usually in the Linux Foundation, usually it starts with a project or an idea. And so in this case, you know, it was a couple of years ago, we were having discussions with folks from the gaming engine community, right? In particular, a team from AWS called the Lumberyard team. So Lumberyard was a source available triple A class engine that, you know, came originally from the Crytek engine kind of code base that AWS was working with. And so they built a pretty decent community around this. And so we were having discussions with them and, you know, there was just an innate desire to have more open source collaboration in gaming, not only to improve and learn from the lessons they had with building the Lumberyard community, but in general, getting, you know, gaming studio involves bringing gaming engines, 3D engines to other industries such as, you know, automotive, you know, 3D engines are being embedded all over the place. People are even doing TV shows like kid shows that are running off of, you know, a 3D, you know, engine, right, you know, within TVs and so on. So there's a whole kind of new world happening here. And as we know from our lessons with, like, Linux and Kubernetes, what better way to kind of, you know, increase innovation in the space that maybe you're not beholden to just a single vendor than doing a fully open source collaborative under a neutral governance structure, you know, approach to kind of build that. So, you know, I think there was a small group of people that saw that vision and kind of wanted to change it. And we had a first project to kind of see the foundation, which was basically the successor to Lumberyard. Internally, that team has been working on completely revamping the code base, moving it from a monolithic architecture to a modular one, making it truly to work on L Cloud. So, like, that was the kind of progenitor project and kind of idea. And if you're involved in, if you know anything about gaming, it's a very weird industry. They tend to be, they tend to have weird feelings around open source. The lawyers, I think, are a little bit behind the time towards attitudes and the engineers in general, I think are just not, the education is not there. And we've seen this in other industries too. So, the fact is that a lot of these engines are used just beyond gaming and some of the automotive 3D rendering is there. And if you look at the world, we are moving towards VR, AR based, you know, Apple should be doing a lot of work there. So, there will be a need for open source, you know, I mean, there is open source 3D rendering, but we need something which is developed by a community. And so, can you talk about that aspect of us again, that, you know, this is while coming from a gaming, but it goes beyond that. Yeah, no, I mean, you mentioned a lot of those examples. Like, you know, I was just having a conversation with someone today that is working on developing, essentially, you can think of a piece of software that runs kind of in a VR environment via 3D engine to help train people on disaster recovery and just, you know, disaster preparedness. I'm like, so it's like being used in healthcare obviously for training in a lot of different ways. So, like, the applicability for like 3D engines to be, you know, all facets are alive is huge. Like, you know, and I've always said, like, we basically, you know, we need the Linux of 3D engines. And, you know, I hope this is a, you know, step towards making that kind of vision a reality. And so, the O3DF was basically formed the house O3D, which is, you know, the successor to, you know, the refactored and rebuilt, you know, essentially Lumberyard project. It was started essentially by AWS, Niantic, Intel, you know, Huawei, you know, we're kind of all of all that, you know, kind of the premier level. And then you have a kind of a bunch of other smaller kind of gaming studios and companies out there, you know, Apocalypse Studios, Kythera, which kind of does, you kind of like essentially AI, you know, based navigation for games and so on. So, like, all these people are coming together from different, you know, kind of walks of industry, right? You have some gaming folks. You got your chipset vendors, obviously, you're interested in sharing these stuff runs extremely well. And then you have gaming studios, like Niantic, that are interested in building games here. Because if you're familiar with the gaming industry, there's really not many, actually, there are no open source AAA class gaming gens out there. There's some like smaller open source engines, but they're generally kind of toy. They're not made to build wide, you know, wide AAA style games, or they're focused on 2D. And most of the other engines out there are commercial and proprietary, right? For every game that you're selling, you're essentially paying a tax for that engine usage, right? And you're also beholden to a vendor where, you know, you may have cool, innovative ideas to improve the engine, but maybe the vendor is not going to accept them, right? Like, it's just not, it's just a terrible relationship. It's just like kind of a whole whole Linux story, right? And Kubernetes, people are able to innovate and compete much faster than commercial offerings there. So it's a brand new foundation. Our first project is O3DE, which is, you know, get super active. There's tons of folks on Discord already saying hi and, you know, small studios popping up saying like, oh, it's so cool to kind of see something fully open source here and welcoming. No, you mentioned a couple of things there. One was that you said, hey, you know, disaster recovery. You talked about healthcare. And the interesting thing is that once again, I just recorded interviews, you know, where Linux Foundation is helping projects with disaster recovery, you know, in Asia and other countries. And then also you have healthcare initiative is there. Your XSoft is there. And then you also have, you know, that Academy Software Foundation. Academy Software Foundation. So what I see is there will be once again, a lot of cross-pollination. Can you already see some discussions going on with these system foundations? Yeah, no, it's the beauty of kind of the Linux Foundation in general. We have all these kind of industry verticals that span automotive, energy, film with the Academy Software Foundation. And so, you know, my inbox already is kind of full this week with folks reaching out, you know, from the automotive side, you know, cars are starting to embed these things inside. And like it would be great maybe if we would have, you know, access to that, how can we potentially make, you know, make that work, right? Within kind of the environment, you know, that we're running into. There's also this whole thing where some car companies also, you know, I don't know if you bought a car, you know, recently, but, you know, you go to a lot of car manufacturers' websites, right? There's like this crazy 3D model design thing where you're like, I want to change the color. I want to do this. So you're kind of like designing. And that's actually like a lot of times there's a 3D engine running that, running that, right? And, you know, car manufacturers are interested in a fully open source unencumbered one that they could use versus maybe, you know, licensing that technology, you know, through a proprietary vendor that they can't kind of collaborate, you know, in the open. So like, yeah, definitely a lot of interest from the Academy Software Foundation side. It's basically a lot of like reusable components, you know, from like color optimizers, you know, to algorithms used to maybe do like explosions in movies. And there is more and more overlap between the film and gaming industries now. In many ways, like, you know, film is using a lot of technology, you know, potentially that is relevant to gaming. People are doing 3D models and all this. So I think you're going to see more overlap between those two kind of, you know, foundations where I think O3DF and O3D are really focused on like a very core stable, you know, engine that is kind of usable, where I see Academy Software Foundation more and like the making the little components, the projects that others could kind of reuse and embed in easier ways kind of, you know, you know, I could see O3DE potentially using some stuff out of Academy Software Foundation to include in their engine or supporting some standard or spec that is developed in the Academy Software Foundation. Linux Foundation has a also very good structure and one of the reasons that a lot of companies, organizations go to Linux Foundation is the governance support. So can you talk about what is going to be the structure of this foundation? Yeah, simple things. So, you know, like all Linux Foundation efforts, we always generally separate the kind of business side of the house from the technical side of the house. So there is a governing board, which is kind of you're full of, you know, basically your member companies who pay money to sustain the foundation, right? So they get kind of a voice on how that, you know, or vote of how that money is spent to support the organization. So mostly boring business stuff. So we have that and then we have a completely separate technical steering committee that is staffed up by the people that work on the engine and potential future projects of O3DF. So that's basically the kind of structure, same type of deal, you know, we always find it useful to separate business from technical governance. Right now it's still in the bootstrap stages where they're all like, we're going to be holding our first governing board meeting for O3DF in, I think it's July 20th. So I think about a couple weeks or so, you know, from now to kind of get started. And then the technical board meetings will follow after that with open elections to kind of fill, I believe there's nine slots for the technical board for O3DF to start. And then we're kind of off to the races. We're going to be doing a first conference for O3D, for the O3D project later this year in October in LA, October 11th and 12th and in Los Angeles, which is awesome because there's a great kind of gaming studio community and obviously LA close to film. So kind of great kind of cross, you know, pollination potential there. And we're also kind of doing some small talks and events at the Gaming Developer Conference or GDC, you know, coming up also. So lots of kind of activity, you know, planned to kind of try to get this community, you know, bootstrap with the typical Linux Foundation structure, but also operating, you know, with, you know, events to gather new people in and all the kind of typical fun stuff we do to kind of bootstrap a foundation. So Chris, can you talk about something that I wanted to talk to you about is that, you know, there is a misconception that if you have members who are paying a fee to be part of a foundation, they influence or control that product. Can you just make it clear that that is not the case? Yeah, no. So, you know, as I've mentioned before, like Linux Foundation breast practice is always a separate the business decisions from the technical decision. So like funding from technical and, you know, the way this basically works is this, if you're a company and you put in money to support an organization, you generally have a seat or have a right to run an election for a seat that has a vote on how that money is spent, right? Kind of like, you know, voting in a local election and having input on how money is potentially spent for a local city, city bond, right? Separately, there is a technical board, which is usually staffed up of people who actually contributed to the project. So it's a duocracy model. So, and those are structured in many different ways. Usually when you bootstrap, there's a mix of some appointed seats to get started. And then eventually things move to kind of an open election, where everything is just based on the people actually contribute and show up code. If you recall how Kubernetes was started, you know, we formed the CNCF. We got the governing board meeting. They just approved the initial budget. The technical board got together and eventually bootstrapped the Kubernetes steering committee, which initially was, I think it was like seven or five people. They laid out all the process and then, you know, got everyone to agree. And then it all moved to kind of open elections every, I think, two years and they kind of staggered the seats. So there's no, there's no like, people sometimes say it's, oh, it's like a pay-to-play model. Like that's not a way of thinking about it. You should think about it as a pay-to-sustain. You're paying, you're pulling money from a bunch of different companies that are coming together. And absolutely, companies should have a right to say how that money is spent, like they're a constituent. What they can't do is force features or certain technical things, you know, on their roadmap. The only way to get accomplished that is by showing up, doing the work and perform, you know, performing like, like a duocracy, you know, tight, tight model. So it's a completely separate approach of where we separate out funding from the technical governance. Usually we'll have a technical board member, usually the chair, the technical board sit on the governing board to have a voice also on potentially things and bring up any issues. But, you know, it's different for each foundation, but we consider that a best practice. I truly consider it as a pay-to-sustain model. And to me, it drives me up a wall a little bit some days because like sometimes projects are like, oh, like people aren't paying or like we can't raise funds and all this stuff. Like, you know, part of the problem is people generally don't just want to like donate money to a project without any form of guarantees, right? That's just basically a donation. That's not like anything potentially useful or like a business contract. With foundations like we do in the LF, like there's clear governance, there's there's clear rules in place of how everything works, how votes are counted, how committees are formed and people come together. You know, sometimes competitors, sometimes, you know, colleagues, you know, together in industry, allies and, you know, they all work together to grow essentially an ecosystem around an open source project. So for me, it's all about like pulling people, pulling resources together in a fair way where people have a fair level of vote and sustaining these projects. Like these things, you know, aren't necessarily free, right? They're open source and free to download, but like the back office stuff of like doing events is not cheap. Training, education, not cheap. Scholarships to ensure that communities retain new people, you know, improve diversity. Like this stuff just doesn't happen overnight or require sustained resources. And it's something that I'm very proud of that we do at the Linux Foundation, I think is kind of, you know, shows how that model works. We're not the only one that does that model, but I think we're definitely one of the better organizations out there that kind of has proven it to work in a lot of different industries and projects. Right. Commercialization is critical to sustainability, survival of open source. Without that, it would not survive. And also, as you were saying earlier, that it's not donation because we need selfish people, you know, you are contributing to a project because you are getting something out of it. Otherwise, when you're doing something out of altruism or, you know, that will just go away tomorrow. So this is, this is a very, very selfish model. And that's a good model, sustainable model. Yeah. It's all mutual self-interest at the end of the day, right? Like it could be companies that want to commercialize something. It's going to be individuals that want to learn a new technology and improve their career. Or like, there's everyone has their own self-interest and we kind of provide the guard rails to ensure that there's an option for companies to support these things financially. If they want through a potential structure, you find it very hard for companies to give money potentially if it's just a donation. It's like, so I have no overall say of how this, you know, may go. Probably not going to happen. So it's, you know, it's, to me, it's an overall great model. And, you know, I also think the other fundamental lesson is, I think we're literally drowning in open source software. There is like hundreds of millions of projects. Not every project out there, I think deserves to be sustained, right? It's just like, it could be just a random idea or something like, you know, there are, there are generally a core set of core libraries or core technologies that truly deserve companies pulling resources together, you know, across organizations to kind of sustain these things. I think there's this weird discussion. Sometimes I talked to me, like, I was like, well, he's like, I have this cool thing. It's used by a few companies. I'm like, awesome. Do you have like a product or like, well, not yet. They're just downloading it. I'm trying to pay for consulting, but the key, the key lesson here is like, there's also like 100 other competing projects that are, you know, also free and available. So it's like, there's this weird thing where, you know, there's a sustainable thing where I think some people out there truly believe like every project deserves to be sustained. I'm like, that's not true. It's just like saying like every company needs to be profitable. Stuff fails all the time. Like it's just the way it works. There are startups out there that aren't successful because they couldn't find product market fit. And the same lesson I think applies to open source projects where, you know, maybe the market is telling you something where, you know, maybe you don't have a good project for that needs or maybe it's productization or it's not something that you could easily build the business around. But like, I just think like people have to be cognizant here because like, we don't necessarily complain if a startup, you know, fails, but I think open source maintainers stroke their arms like, oh, it's like the end of the world. Like, well, your project failed, but there's like 30 other alternatives that seem to work. Like, I'm sorry. Like that's just the way the world works. But I'll stop. I'll stop right here. No, no, no. You're absolutely right. Because we have we have this. There's so many times that open source is not a business model. It's a collaborative model. It's a social model. And companies, as you rightly said, and whether it's a commercial project or an open source product, if there are no users, it should it's a market should decide whether the project should live or die. You should not put it on dialysis to keep it alive. Yeah. And people come in and say, oh, like open source has issues like it has issues, but like it's I don't think like sustainability. It's an issue for some things, you know, that fly under the radar that are typical open SSL and other like things that may be too low on the stack that have been ignored. But like we're literally drowning in open source projects. There's just so many out there. I think the true hard part is like identifying what people are are using and care about because there's options for almost everything. And people that that mutual self interest comes to play and people find kind of ways around it, right? You know, a company may take an open source project and make it like, you know, non open source license. And what happens a bunch of companies with mutual self interest come together and find a way around it like fund something else. So it's like there's just there's like market like there's like true market dynamics that are happening in open source that that I don't think existed a while ago. Because what happened is open source is truly the default now like it's everywhere. It's in our cars. It's in our fridges. It's like everywhere, right? So it's just there's so much of it. There's so many options where before there was scarcity. And maybe there was only one library, but now there's like there's like tons of different open SSL implementations out there to choose from. They're like people are rewriting the world in rust now. And there's just so many options out there. It's not it's not a scarcity problem. It's more of like a focus and attention of like where should we kind of collaborate and pull resources on truly the things that are important, you know, to us. But yeah, that's my kind of rant. You know, for the day, it's truly it's it's it's a we're drawing an open source software was too much of it in many ways. No, and I think Linux has been a trailblazer because it made people comfortable that you can use in a commercial setup. And of course, you can put a lot of blame on Linux foundation also, because you folks made it easy for companies to get involved easily. And if you look at any foundation projects, there are so many. It's incredible to see that we are now finally saying that there's too much open source because I remember in the big day of my career, we were trying to tell people, hey, you should open source stuff. And to be honest with you, when it is becoming challenging for me also as journalists, that, you know, when you say open source in early days, open source meant just, you know, small now is more to say, I am a sports journalist, but which sports, you know, there's so many sports. So saying that I cover open source is not enough. So you have to then pick some niche within open source. You've completely nailed it. And, you know, like, I think there's different industries that are a little bit more ahead than others. Like obviously the cloud providers, they get it, you know, but, you know, like, for example, financial industry, we started the, or we were essentially collaborating with the Finnaws Foundation, right? And, you know, their whole mission was like teaching banks, financial institutions, how to properly do open source, how to maybe film an open source office, how to contribute, have some standards. Same thing is happening now with like the gaming industry, which has been kind of like open source shy. Maybe they consumed a little bit, but their companies historically block them, you know, from contributing or collaborating across each other. And like, we're seeing that same cycle repeat where just like, you know, with Finnaws or the Academy Software Foundation, where they were just rebuilding all these platform pieces, you know, there's a portion of your stack that is truly commodity in your industry that you don't make money off. You should stop reinventing the wheel and actually collaborate with your peers and competitors on that and then deliver value on top. And I think the gaming industry is realizing that, at least for some engines out there, having a fully open option where they could kind of collaborate on some components there for their specific needs is going to help. And the other fascinating thing for you that you may not be aware of, like, so O3DE, initially, it supports, you know, windows out of box with a bit of Linux, you know, support and, you know, Mac OS stuff is being underdeveloped. Historically, the gaming industry, very Windows, Microsoft type heavy, which is also a very fascinating thing where a lot of those developers are, you know, traditional visual studio folks. It's just been fascinating where, you know, we're going in there and see another industry where you're kind of teaching them about the benefits of open source, how to work in the open, here are different tools. And, you know, I have high confidence that, you know, O3DE will help impact the gaming industry in a positive way where they'll truly be better Linux support for gaming, which has always been an issue. Like I used to complain, like, why doesn't Steam work well on Linux? So all this stuff, I think, will improve. Right. No, you said it so rightly, and I fully agree with you because game developers, they waste so many resources on those basics. And most game developers, they kind of, you know, either, you know, use somebody else's engine. So it should be a commodity, you know, piece so that you can focus on creating great games is the wasting time and resources. I think it's a cultural shift that is happening. And I think the cultural shift is needed. I think this foundation will help the cultural change technology is easy problem to solve. Culture is a much harder problem to solve. Exactly. And my personal feelings, I don't know if this will happen. Maybe there'll be multiple distributions of O3DE, just like there were in Linux land, right? Like Linux obviously is the base layer, but people are completely fine to pay for a distribution or a hosted potential offering. And so maybe in the future, you'll see O3D distros optimized maybe for 2D games or 3D 2D 3D type games or some for cloud-based rendering, maybe some for particular mobile devices or apps. So I think you may have that innovation. I'm not sure if that will happen yet, but given how modular things are and that desire for modularity, maybe they'll happen. And to me, that is success. If you have multiple distributions, multiple self-interest driving this ecosystem and all benefiting from it, I think that's kind of a winning story. But it's literally still early days. It's been a couple years getting this organization started. We're going to do it a little bit earlier, but the pandemic put a little bit of a slowdown on things. But I'm personally very happy to kind of see where things are. And the other kind of notable thing, by the way, this is a project that came from AWS. This is probably one of the, not often do you see AWS kind of leading the charge on truly doing an industry-changing bit of open source. Generally, in my view, I think they're good open source citizens. They've definitely improved over the years. Like every company goes through this kind of transition. We've seen with Microsoft, I think AWS is doing the same thing. But this is truly, to me, is a very cool thing to see this actually come out of AWS from day one. No, yeah. I fully agree with you. And yeah, companies are changing. AWS is also changing. And also Linux Foundation, the way you offer governance, there is a lot of a scope. We have seen that with Kubernetes, there are so many distributions with Linux, so many distributions. And the funny thing with that is that you don't dictate. The industry can decide if they want. All you do is support. So yeah, I'm actually really excited as a gamer. As I said, I'm really excited about this foundation and I'll be monitoring it closely. Chris, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about the new foundation. If somebody wants to get involved with the foundation, what is the best way to approach? Yeah, the first recommendation is I would go to o3d.org and check out the site. There's a link to join the Discord, which is kind of the de facto chat platform that's used by O3D. I would join that Discord and there's a bunch of channels for different interests, whether you're interested in improved Linux support or you're caring about diversity inclusion in the space or you care about the presentation layer, so on. It's all there. I would join the Discord first. If you want to kind of meet people physically in person, we're going to be doing o3d.com later this year in LA. If you could just Google o3d.com, I think it's o3d.com.org and you'll find the website, register and join. It's kind of one of the first, I won't say it's the first, but one of the early kind of open source gaming type events. Obviously, folks at o3d.com, but we do have an intention of growing the event to be more inclusive of just open source and gaming in general. The engine is just one piece, but there's many other areas that we could kind of bring open source. So yeah, o3d.org and then check out o3d.com and hopefully we'll see some of you in LA. Yeah, and finally, there is a Linux foundation even where I can bring my Nintendo Switch and actually play there too. Yeah, you will set up. I mean, what's great is like, I love my cloud native infrastructure friends and like, I love cube cons, like just beautiful, fantastic events, you know, basically largest open source events in the industry, but I'm excited to kind of bring that same level of like openness, inclusivity and energy to the gaming engine industry. I'm excited. Thank you.