Ed Catmull: Will You be Open or Closed?

Well, I came out of a university environment which is very open, so I was inspired by that. And I would say it was at the time, I knew it was an extraordinary environment in the way that we share things with each other. So I came out with this idea of making a film. And I wasn't the only one around who wanted to do that. And I was aware because it was actually a really small field. We're talking about a handful of people here, and they wanted to get there first. They were very competitive with their ideas, and so they did not want to share their discoveries. And at this time, siggraph, the computer graphics community, was brand new. But my belief at the time was that we were so far away from what we needed that the ideas that were current today would get completely bypassed. So we published everything. And the rationale was that if we publish everything, we're more likely to attract the best people. So we began to accumulate people that not only shared in the vision, but they were very good because they liked the idea of sharing. And we. We were rewarded because not only did we get these people, but we were participating in a bigger community. And today, most of my friends are still in this community. I really highly value them. We get together all the time. Steve never actually tried to prevent us from doing it. Even when Steve was there, we always publish, and to this day, we still do. In fact, the last couple years, the papers coming out of Disney and Pixar have been the single biggest block of papers from any institution. So you've maintained that openness, despite Jobs infamous sort of secrecy. At Apple, he was okay with you operating. He never applied it to us. He said, do it my way.