Ton Roosendaal (father of Blender) writes about his Siggraph experiences https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/ ... 16-report/:
Autodesk meeting
Autodesk has appointed a director open source strategy, he couldn’t attend but connected me with Marc Stevens and Chris Vienneau, executives in the M&E department. They also brought in Arnold’s creator Marcos Fajardo.
Marcos expressed their interest in having Arnold support for Blender. We discussed the (legal, licensing) technicalities of this a bit more, but for as long they stick to data transport between the programs (like PRman and VRay do now using Blender’s render API) there’s no issue. With Marc and Chris I had a lengthy discussion about Autodesk’s (lack of) commitment to open source and openly accessible production pipelines. They said that Autodesk is changing their strategy though and they will show this with actively sharing sources or participating in open projects as well. I invited them to publish the FBX spec doc (needs to get blessings from board, but they’ll try) and to work with Pixar on getting the character module for USD fleshed out (make it work for Maya + Max, in open license). The latter suggestion was met with quite some enthusiasm. Would make the whole FBX issue go away mostly.