Animation software going open, a new open source medical tool, and more news

Catch up on open source news highlights from the past two weeks.

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Opensource.com

In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look animation software going open, new open source medical tool, Nijmegen updates its open source policy, and more!

Software used with hit animation goes open source

A key piece of software used to produce hit movies like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Into the Spider-Verse is going open source. Sony Pictures is passing the code for color management software OpenColorIO to the Academy Software Foundation, a Linux Foundation-backed project devoted to increasing the use of open source software in the movie industry.

Sony is sharing OpenColorIO with the broader movie industry under a BSD-like license. By handing the code to the Academy Software Foundation, the studio "hopes that it is the community who will help see this advanced tool used to its fullest potential." According to Sony executive Michael Ford, "developers and companies that use it every day will guide the project roadmap."

Open source tool for identifying causes of diseases

Often, there's more than one cause for a disease. That makes diagnosing and treating them a challenge for doctors. Researchers at Boston University's School of Medicine are trying to make the job of identifying those causes easier with its Candidate Driver Analysis (CaDrA for short) tool, which they've made "available free to members of the research community."

Researchers at the School of Medicine say that clinicians can use CaDrA "to search for genetic and epigenetic alterations likely to cause a malignancy." They can then use that data to "support the identification of novel therapeutic targets." You can browse or download the code for CaDrA from its repository on GitHub.

Nijmegen to go "digitally independent"

The city of Nijmegen in the Netherlands has been advocating the use of open source in government since 2003. While it's been slowly moving to more free and open source solutions, the city recently adopted a resolution that requires it to use "the recommended open standards listed by the Dutch Standardisation Forum for external as well as internal communications."

The goal is to "force the interoperability of software," according to Joep Bos-Coenraad, a Nijmegen city councilor. He adds that "lock-in by proprietary suppliers makes it hard to migrate to free and open source software solutions." On top of that, Nijmegen "wants external suppliers to have sufficient experience with open source solutions, and to explicitly include open source alternatives in their consultancy recommendations."

Social & Human Capital Coalition launch

In late 2017, Opensource.com published an article that briefly discussed the role of the draft Social Capital Protocol as a tool for the development of the open organization. Since then, and via an ongoing collaborative design and consultation effort involving more than 50 companies and 250 participants, the Social & Human Capital Protocol has continued to evolve, and on February 28, 2019, was formally launched by the sponsoring organization, the Social & Human Capital Coalition (SHCC).

In the words of the Coalition, the Protocol "provides a consistent process to guide businesses as they assess their relationship with social and human capital. It offers an overarching framework for collaborative action to bring together different approaches for social and human capital measurement and valuation and is designed to be used alongside the Natural Capital Protocol to understand the full spectrum of business interactions with people, society and the environment."

Linux Foundation debuts project for safety-critical systems

There are a lot of questions around the safety of autonomous systems, especially ones that operate in situations that could endanger humans. To help change that, the Linux Foundation teaming up with automakers BMW and Toyota, processor manufacturer ARM, and service providers Linutronix and Kuka to develop "safety-critical systems across industries."

The project is called ELISA (short for Enabling Linux in Safety Applications). Its goal is to "help companies build and certify Linux-based systems whose failure could result in loss of human life, significant property damage, or environmental damage." To do that, ELISA will educate "the open source community on safety engineering best practices" and provide processes and documentation to bolster those best practices.

In other news

Thanks, as always, to Opensource.com staff members and moderators for their help this week. Make sure to check out our event calendar, to see what's happening next week in open source.