In the past, Pixar chose to hold certain patents close to its chest, and then when 3rd party application developers chose to implement similar features, they ha

In the past, Pixar chose to hold certain patents close to its chest, and then when 3rd party application developers chose to implement similar features, they had to avoid the patents. This meant that industry standard 3rd party software sometimes had inferior and/or broken implementaions of certain, fundamental technologies. Which caused much frustration when we (Pixar.. I used to work there) started to use those same 3rd party packages ourselves in-house. Instead of that, how about ... do the research, do the engineering, patent the correct approach, open source a reference implementation, license it properly, and thereby force the industry's hand to "do it the right way" so that Pixar can take advantage of 3rd party tools that implement those particular technologies correctly. +1 to Manuel, who's been working on this stuff for a while. Cool to see this happen.