Beyond benefiting from open source and wanting to give back, these studios use lots of software with different features and file formats to work on the same assets. It's really helpful when they can use the same techniques or files across multiple packages. They open source this tech in the hope that it will be adopted more broadly among the software packages they use. Hence Alembic, OpenEXR, etc.
As has ILM: http://www.openexr.com/
Beyond benefiting from open source and wanting to give back, these studios use lots of software with different features and file formats to work on the same assets. It's really helpful when they can use the same techniques or files across multiple packages. They open source this tech in the hope that it will be adopted more broadly among the software packages they use. Hence Alembic, OpenEXR, etc.