millimeter: The Lure of Linux

[ Thanks to Martin for this link. ]

“Jean-Luc Bouchard is marketing director of Venice-based Nothing
Real, which makes high-end compositing tools including the popular
Shake. In this piece Bouchard discusses the appeal of Linux and
some of the challenges in porting an established product to Linux.
Nothing Real’s new product Tremor, a front-room client based
compositing system currently in beta and slated for an NAB 2001
debut, will also run on Linux.”

“At the beginning of 2000, Nothing Real started talking
seriously about the state of operating systems and the possibility
of porting our flagship compositor, Shake, to alternative
platforms. We started assessing the pros and cons of what was
available. On one hand, there was the battle-proven Irix, which had
been the industry’s platform of choice, but which was coming under
heavy fire because of the price and evolution of its associated
hardware. On the other hand, there was NT, the “beast” that no one
ever really took seriously, but sure wished that they could buy its
related hardware. Then, on the fringe there was Apple, touting its
long-awaited and elusive OSX, which seemed to promise a lot. In
addition, there were the usual dinosaurs and newbies with tons of
promises and failures like BeOS, True 64, and a multitude of Unix
flavors.”

“What came out of our early conversations was that none of these
alternative operating systems really brought anything new to the
table. Each of them had flaws and strengths but mostly they either
appealed to a very small group of technology geeks or the
manufacturers were still short on the delivery side. Given that the
nature of Nothing Real has always been based on openness, there was
little to make us excited.”

“But there was one remaining alternative that was already right
under our noses, the OS that was driving our file server and mail
server, an OS we had always admired and used-Linux. Some of our
engineers were fans and over the years had done unofficial ports to
test the rendering speeds and the state of Open GL.”

Complete Story