Last year, when the Walt Disney Co.'s feature animation unit, in Burbank, Calif., announced that it was using Linux for digital animation work, speculation grew that Adobe Systems Inc. would finally port its products to Linux. To this day, however, Adobe has done no such thing. Rather than wait, Disney, along with two other motion picture animation studios (which declined to be named for this article), decided to jointly fund the development of a Windows-to-Linux porting solution. The idea: develop technology using the Wine emulator to run Adobe Photoshop on Linux.
While animation studios compete fiercely for ticket sales and are not known as team players, all three agreed that a project that would benefit the entire open-source community—while delivering a technology they needed—was worth their cooperation, said Jack Brooks, director of technology at Walt Disney Feature Animation. The project has paid off tremendously for Disney this year alone. Development of the porting solution, including site licenses, cost Disney less than $15,000. Had he opted to run Photoshop on Windows machines, it would have cost upward of $50,000 just in annual licensing fees, said Brooks. He estimates support would have been an additional $40,000 a year.
News source: eWeek
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