One example of the difficulties facing the film industry is ILM's OpenEXR file format, which is widely supported, but it's been tough for other companies to contribute to it. And it doesn't help that the original developer left ILM. Even though there's an open source software library for EXR, Bredow says contributing to it is a slow process for outside developers, something that quietly discourages people from working on the format at all. Looking ahead, ILM is planning to make EXR a part of the Academy Software Foundation.

Today, software engineers are "essential" to moviemaking, according to David Morin, one of the project leads for the open source investigation. One of the major roles of the foundation, as he sees it, is to shine a light on the work of programmers.

"This is a first for the Academy... It's never lent its name to anything it didn't completely control," said Andy Maltz, managing director of the Academy's Science and Technology Council, said in an interview. "Our job is to protect the sanctity of the Oscars, and advance the state of the art of motion pictures... We felt that providing a forum for software engineers, developers and other technologists to just make things easier to develop open source software was really critical to the future health of the motion picture industry."

At launch, the Academy Software Foundation's members include Disney, Intel, Unreal Engine, Dreamworks and WETA Digital. Its announcement comes just in time for SIGGRAPH next week, the annual conference focused on computer graphics.