The film industry has a tradition of developing proprietary tools but does like open source. The film industry has sponsored development of GIMP, Photoshop on Wine, FLTK, and probably other OSS projects I’m unaware of. It’s hard to know how much the film industry does because their OSS support often goes unacknowledged. For example, GIMP never announced or gave a public thank you to their film industry sponsors.

In general, it’s difficult to earmark studio funding for open source because Hollywood budgets are typically project-based (per film) and may not have a general R&D fund to tap. Remarkably, in 1998 the film industry hired several GIMP developers as employees and give them the mandate to make open source better by adding deep paint support to GIMP.

That GIMP never made a release of the film industry-funded development did not set a good precedent for future collaboration. Had it been a big success, there would be more open source collaboration in the film industry today.