April Fools! Pixar aquires the source to Aqsis and Pixie in stunning lawsuit

Update : Yes it was a joke ;)

It seems that history repeats itself, as we all remember the sad demise of BMRT and Entropy due to the lawsuit against Larry Gritz by Pixar over patent infringment, or something to that effect. Well recently it has come to our attention that certain projects are being hit with the same lawsuits over graphics technology patents and now Aqsis and Pixe are now no more in the open source domain.

What this means is that the developers have to license the RiSpec from Pixar despite the fact that the code was written from scratch, the patent technology described in papers are so close to the Pixar source code that lawyers are afraid of investment loss. "Aqsis and Pixe, while being open source has this code that infringes on the technolgy Pixar invented, clearly the need to take effort to protect the name and reputation, as well as financial investments, is required" says a source that wishes not to be named for legal reasons.

This seems to be a common trend in the software industry where one technology company sues another over patent infringement, it seems that the open source world is not immune of this legal battle either. This comes as a devestating blow to the community since this means that development on these projects comes to a halt and will require the developers to license the patent, sell the software in order to recoup the license cost and make profit to pay for the subsequent years thereafter.

Already the developers of 3Delight, AIR and RenderDotC have adjusted the pricing to cover the fees with the same legal action, though it is far easier for them since they are commercial products already with established footprints in the industry. The open source community of Renderman users and artists were just starting to establish the valid reason for such tools and on the brink of the dawn the rug was pulled from under us and now we either use the old versions that will remain as is or pay for the next gen versions of our beloved rendering apps.

It is a sad time in our chapter as a whole and we wish the developers of Aqsis and Pixie well as they adjust to the dealings of commercial development. We are only waiting to see if our site gets hit with the same lawsuit over the name RenderMan itself, something also spoken of around the net here and there, so time will only tell if this site exists in the future at all.

Posting

Some notes on posting :

Please enter a title first, before writing any text and saving as draft or publishing. This is important. Without a title, the post is saved and named, for example, http://blendertorenderman.blogspot.com/2008/02/blog-post.html.

The name blog-post.html cannot be changed later, and this leads to duplicate links, less results in Google searches, and confusing data in Google Analytics pages, since entries do not have descriptive names.

Labels help navigate the blog and find posts on particular subjects, for example, clicking on the label shaders will open a page of all posts with that label. This is the equivalent of topics and threads on a PHP forum, and is very useful. It is possible this also increases the result in Google searches. The full list of labels is shown if you click Show All at the bottom right of the post entry form. I have used this and the previous post to add a collection of useful labels. I can add and edit labels manually if needed.

Images can be included in posts. These are best hosted elsewhere, if necessary mail them to me at :

blendertorenderman at gmail dot com

and I can upload them to Blender To RenderMan Site and mail you back the links with the embed code for a 600 x 450 preview, linking to a full size version on the site when clicked. The site is hosted on a very fast server and is better than Imageshack, Photobucket, Flickr and so on.

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For example, the following embed code :

object width="425" height="350" ... type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"

Should be changed to :

object width="630" height="508" ... type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="630" height="508"

This allows for an aspect ratio of 1.333333333 (4:3) and a 32 pixel margin for the player controls, without any border errors.

When there are more videos of demonstrations, tutorials and rendered animations on individual YouTube accounts, I can create playlists in the Blender to RenderMan YouTube account, grouping them together in various ways, eg, a full set of tutorials for a particular BlenderMan exporter, another playlist for a collection of demos of all the exporters, collections of animations, and related off-topic content, for example, SGI and Pixar technology demos and shorts.

Finally, do not forget to use the Blender to RenderMan Group, and make announcements there for any posts here including a link to them. All topics should be announced on the group. The group is easier and faster to read than this blog, and also increases search engine coverage.

Note I have added a feed for the group and Comp Graphics Rendering RenderMan at the bottom of the sidebar. Other feeds might be added later, as can links to more related Blender and RenderMan sites and software.