Project Update

Time for another project update! Stella and I have been navigating through the project and working on commits, and there are bright and dark spots to it. I’ve been having a relatively easy time talking to the maintainers of OpenFoodFacts, the project we’ve been working on, and getting my changes merged in. However, Stella has been struggling. They don’t know what’s up with one of the maintainer on the other side of the screen, but there has been one guy who has been pretty rude to them. This behavior has since lightened up, but it kinda makes me want to avoid some really nasty interactions (especially since I usually treat strangers like bears, or people who would want to screw my life over if I even attempted to prod and push them). It also caused me to end up doing more contributions than Stella for now.

This isn’t to say that I haven’t had my pain points either. There was this one time when a guy made a pull request to an issue that I had already claimed. Yeah, the maintainers then literally went all out against that guy who already cut me off, but it kinda started building my vendetta against people with GitHub profile images that are just them passed into ChatGPT with a prompt to “make this a Studio Ghibidi photo” or something like that. (And as much as the code of conduct is there and I could’ve invoked it during the maintainer’s beef with and being rude to Stella, I find it to be a lot more trouble to go through that process for something kind of minor.) Also, I’m pretty sure these maintainers have lives to live, but they’ve been slow to respond to some issues and pull requests I’ve mentioned, which has been pretty annoying.

Update 4/21: Stella and I found out that our scope for one of our issues just got a bit bigger, which is actually really good for us, because I’ve been comparing the progress of my group with other groups and I feel kinda stressed that we haven’t done enough?

Open Source in the Movies

I’ve also been doing some reflection on the open source field as it is right now, and the class on Wednesday did also help me out. In particular, I found the fact that open source is used in the film industry to kind of be crazy, but it all makes sense once I found out why open source works for the film industry. This industry was already pretty reliant on custom workstations that don’t run Windows or macOS back when computers got powerful enough and tech got advanced enough that the analog filmmaking workflow could be at least partially converted into a digital workflow. This kind of went on for a bit, till these film studios realized that maybe there was a better way of running their film studios. As it turns out, throwing workstations in the mix also involves getting people to work on programming the software that these film studios would use.

Annnndddddd now these companies are basically begging software engineers who are also considering joining the big tech companies (MANGA? FAANG? What’s the new initialism now?) and they got both a labor problem and a spend problem, since these companies are basically running dry on people to work on film studio software and the only way you can sway someone to go from a big tech company to a film studio as a software engineer is to just pay them more. But that just isn’t tenable for all the obvious reasons.

So enter open source between different film studios and outsiders. Instead of having every single film studio duplicate the work that another film studio has already done, these studios can allocate a chunk of their software engineers to work on an open core software core that studios can then stack their own proprietary secret software on top of it to make it their own. This way, these studios can allocate more of their resources on what moviemaking magic they’re great at instead of trying to duplicate whatever work other movie studios have created. Plus, open source isn’t even a threat to these production houses, as each film studio is good at their own thing, and what would be a threat to their business model is not being able to maintain their competitive edge against other movie studios by not being able to effectively work on the next breakthrough in what these film studios are already good on. (And plus, each film studio has workflows and code that only really works for them, so there are things that they can’t even open source even if they really wanted to, and even if they wanted to open source things, they’ll probably want to reskin the things that people actually interact with just to fit into their workflow anyways.)

Also as a result of the film industry open sourcing some of their technical work, they ended up getting people interested in both contributing to new innovations to the core aspects (including people interested in software engineering and movie production) that they would never had attracted to in the first place. This, plus running programs to train people on certain movie making software, makes the film industry a more accessible place.

I really decided to look into this topic because I had roommates who are in film and they’re all using mainly proprietary software, but finding out that the film industry is more open source than you’d think is really cool. I don’t know if I will ever pivot to the film industry, but who knows? It sounds really cool!