My initial reaction to this was, "Why would Pixar do this and remove such an advantage that they hold against Dreamworks and other animation companies?" And then it dawned on me, the animation is such a small piece of why we love their movies. We love them for their characters and their writing and their stories. The animation is the glue that ties it together so this is actually really rad. Now that people can use this to animate as well as Pixar, it's time for everyone to tell the best stories they can and capture the hearts of future generations, just like Pixar has.
Side question: If Jobs were still alive, do you think this would have happened?
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.
Well, pixar is now a part of Disney, and Disney has open source program http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/index.html namely ptex. Also, advantage pixar holds is not really technological, it is about their content creators. I would even argue that PDI/Dreamworks has tech advantage, even Imageworks. Also, it has become a fashion of sorts to release stuff into the wild by animation companies:
To answer the side question, I think so for two reasons.
1. He certainly could have had his hand in the pot but Pixar is under the control of Disney/Catmull & Lasseter. Jobs/His family are the largest single individual share holder in Disney but its not like he had/has majority say. If they needed to do this to keep making quality films, even if he was in a particularly bad mood towards OSS (say, Linus decided to say something cheery about OS X), they could tell him to go run his own company.
2. Apple, where Steve was clearly king, would open source or give away software at times, likely when it made business sense and not for the sake of brotherly FOSS love. For example: Contributions to KHTML (Webkit) and Clang, and wholly contributed things like libdispatch, Apple Lossless codec, etc[1].
I'm pretty sure Pixar's move here would be considered a good business move.
Side question: If Jobs were still alive, do you think this would have happened?