'There needs to be a process around what we are going to open source which involves legal at a very early stage,' Martin said. These are areas where all companies must tread carefully, and developers need to be fully confident that they can use code efficiently without dealing with a heavyweight process to get permissions for using or contributing. They need to understand various licenses to avoid legal complexity, and they must be aware that releasing some code may also expose company IP. Because they also have industry-leading proprietary solutions, they need to be extra careful with consuming and contributing to open source. Process and Planningīut it's not easy for a large company like Autodesk to engage with the open source community. Autodesk's GitHub repository currently has more than projects. In addition to contributing to various open source projects, the company has also open sourced some of its own projects. This leads to a typical open source ecosystem that allows film and media companies to mix and match solutions from different vendors. 'We have contributed to projects like Universal Scene Description (USD) and OpenColorIO to help our film and media customers utilize not only our products but also products from other companies through the combination of open source software,' said Martin.

One of the things that Martin is most proud of is the work his company is doing in the film and media space. 'Like any company.we consume a lot of open source,' said Martin, 'I was brought in to help Autodesk's open source strategy in terms of how we contribute back more effectively to open source, how we open source code within our environment, which we want to be a standard - code which is non-differentiating and not strategic IP.' Companies today can't get away with not using open source, says Guy Martin, Director, who recently sat down with us for a deep dive into Autodesk's engagement with and contributions to the open source community.

Open source autodesk memento