It’s been said that successful communities have specific characteristics that include having a focus on a shared problem, active learning, collective “ownership”, diversity in partners, commitment to support implementation and an effective structure of governance and decision making. In this interview, I had an opportunity to catch up with Autodesk CTO Raji Arasu to talk about open source and what it takes to create a thriving open source community.
AC (me): Hi Raji, it’s so great to have this time to connect with you. Thanks so much for making time to chat with me.
Raji: Hi Aliza. Thanks for the opportunity to share my thoughts and passion for open source.
AC: Cool! Let’s get started...let’s start with getting to know you a bit. We know you are CTO of Autodesk, could you share a little about your role and what excites you about it?
Raji: I get the privilege and the pleasure of working with a lot of our engineers and technologists on some groundbreaking technology, whether it's 3D graphics or whether it's simulation rendering, or modeling. There's so much amazing work that goes on in here and which touches multiple industries. These are construction, architecture, manufacturing, and media and entertainment. There are also some super exciting infrastructure plays that we are making. The impact that we can have – the technology – is what makes my job so much more fun.
AC: Thanks for sharing that, Raji. Now, let’s transition to the big topic at hand…open source. This is a two-part question, the first is Why is open source important to Autodesk? The follow-up to that is…How is Autodesk’s open source contributions and projects making an impact in the industries you just mentioned?
Now, when it comes to the industries that Autodesk serves, I think we are not new in thinking about open source. Open platform is something that Autodesk has always believed in because it is open, it's extensible and it's impactful. When you look at our history, we've done amazing things by opening a platform like AutoCAD and also through Maya.
For decades, Autodesk has actually created solutions where developers have been able to extend products like AutoCAD and be able to create new solutions for multiple industries. This has given birth to so many different technologies over time.
Similarly, Maya has played a huge role where many production studios have extended Maya and created thousands of solutions in their pipelines. This has foundationally changed the way movies are made and how media is created.
When I look at that and our latest strategy around being able to open up our core IP and some of the things we do through APIs for our customers and for our developers, this is a continuation of the journey we’ve started. Open Source continues to be core underneath all of that.
A recent example is our work that we are doing with USD, universal scene description. It is a framework developed by Pixar Animation Studios for the interchange of 3D data, with a focus on collaboration, pipeline efficiency and scale. We are working closely with this community and with Pixar to ensure that we can extend Hydra, an open source framework to transport live scene graph data to renderers, as a technology and use it for core ViewPort solutions that Autodesk focuses on. This is exciting, even in this one example, of the work that we are doing in extending an open source solution. Our technologists are very excited about that. We have a lot of engagement and people are contributing to open source in this particular area.
AC: Thank you so much, I love the examples you gave. So, let me switch over to my question. How is open source a natural fit for Autodesk?
Raji: If I look at all of the problems that we are trying to address, the complexities in that and the opportunities that are ahead of us, this is not just something that we, as a company, are solving for our customers. The customers, the internal developers, the third-party developers, are focused on the same problems too. Many people in our industries are looking at these problems as well.
We have a huge opportunity to put our heads together and extend each other’s solutions. We see this whether in the area of digital twins, or in the area of data and data interoperability, or in an area like design technologies or modeling or visualization and rendering. All these technologies get better and better over time. Imagine the power of everybody pitching in to make these technologies better and better. That is the dream and vision that we have.
Now, given all of that, there is also a huge focus on inner sourcing internally. We are building common capabilities for all, across all industries. We are opening up some of these services for many of our developers to be able to contribute across the board, across the company, so that we can actually inner source and develop some of these capabilities and accelerate innovation for our customers. In many companies, this same concept, where they adopt inner source and open source, is similar in how we create the mindset and acceleration for our customers.
These are the reasons why I believe open source is a natural fit for Autodesk. It has a real positive impact on our customers, and internal and external developers are engaged and they have the ability to go faster.
AC: I love that it’s really about the community of technologists, both internal and external, who solve problems together. You just talked about inner sourcing. How does open source play into the Autodesk journey to become a platform company?
Raji: I think open source means you have to be cognizant of the problems that the community has. You have to be engaged with the external community. You need to understand the industry. You need to understand the community and that, I believe, is a core foundation in creating a platform company. A platform company enables multiple players to come together. These interactions become stronger and better in the service of the customer. I think this is essentially the spirit of what we mean when we talk about becoming a platform company.
Open source does exactly that. It’s about understanding the developer community that we serve. It’s about understanding our customers and understanding the industries. We are coming together on common problems and finding the technologies that are already addressing these problems and extending it, then contributing it back.
This is a big deal and I think this is how we are going to make rapid progress in our industries – through technology and through these communities coming together. I believe this will happen, not just in the code but also with data and standards. It’s about how we exchange data, and how we exchange data formats. This will happen in both AI services and in how we think about standards globally. It’s going to happen in multiple areas and I think we will all go faster when we go together.
AC: Thank you for that last line “we all go faster when we go together”. It’s profound. Now, for my final question. What are the top one to three things that are required to have a thriving and vibrant open source community?
Raji: Open source does not happen automatically. It takes effort from the company. It’s not just about having a vision and strategy. It takes effort and investment. When we started to use USD, we had to put some teams on this to focus on it. This enabled us to understand open technology and how it is going to evolve and how we can contribute to it, as well as understanding what makes sense and how we really need to have high quality code contribution. It’s important for companies, who believe in open source, to put investment and effort aside to make this happen.
The second thing is to promote it within and outside the company. Talk about it because I think it’s really important that people understand that this is important to you, to the leadership team, to the community and to our customers.
The third thing is engaging with the community. It’s not enough to put a technology or piece of software out there that we open source. We need to understand what is the next wave and what does this mean. Also, we need to understand what are the problems that people are running into and be able to actually create that roadmap and publish it, as well as shepherd it. If you don’t do that, it doesn’t get to the next phase. This is why it’s really important to engage with the community and understand what gets in the way.
AC: Whew! Raji, all of this is such great guidance. Thank you so much for your time and energy in this interview. I learned a lot from you!
Raji: This was fun. Thanks for having me.
You must be a registered user to add a comment. If you've already registered, sign in. Otherwise, register and sign in.