O3DE is an Apache 2.0 licensed multi-platform 3D engine originally developed by AWS as the fully open source successor to Amazon Lumberyard. The engine includes an end-to-end development environment that includes a new multi-threaded photorealistic renderer, an extensible 3D content editor, a data-driven character animation system, and a visual scripting development environment. As part of the Linux Foundation, Open 3D Engine contributors and developers will benefit from cloud native support and collaboration.

The O3D Foundation (O3DF) is the umbrella open source organization that houses the O3DE project. The O3DF can be thought of as a sister foundation to CNCF or OpenJS, which serve as umbrella organizations under the Linux Foundation to house multiple open source projects and pool resources amongst the member community to sustain these projects. O3DE is the first project of the O3DF, but it is expected for the O3DF to house multiple projects in the future.

The O3DE project is currently being used by AWS, multiple game studios, robotics developers and animation studios.

To see the current list of members that are working together to advance Open 3D Foundation and O3DE as a cross industry open source 3D engine, check the website members page.

Any organization today can take advantage of the O3DE open source project, just like Linux or Kubernetes. However, organizations join O3DE  because they want to take an active role in supporting the growth and evolution of the overall O3DE ecosystem. If you are interested in joining, please email info@o3d.foundation and we’ll get back to you shortly.

As with many other open source projects, providing a neutral home for the community to collaborate encourages more participation and contribution. The O3DE initiative under O3DF and the Linux Foundation will enable the community to spread responsibilities and costs for infrastructure, events, and outreach – helping to increase overall investment – while providing more opportunities to get involved.

View our Host a Project page to learn more about submitting a project for consideration. We are bootstrapping the technical advisory committee, which will manage the onboarding and project progression processes. In the meantime, email us at info@o3d.foundation if you have a project you want us to host.

We welcome and encourage you to find our projects on GitHub: https://github.com/o3de.  There is a list of Special Interest Groups (SIGs) that you can join based on your expertise. See the full list of SIGs here: https://github.com/o3de/community

O3DE is permissively open source licensed, the default outbound project license will be the Apache License 2.0, however, users may elect at their option to use the MIT License. All new inbound code contributions must be made using both the Apache License, Version 2.0, available at the MIT license. See the project technical charter and the accompanying IP Policy for more information.

In addition to neutral governance ensuring equal treatment in the community, the foundation will provide more resources for the O3DE community which will benefit all contributors. Some examples of things the foundation will help with are organizing events and working groups, formalizing governance structures, providing marketing support to the project, events and handling IP and other legal issues as they arise.

A governance structure will be established, legal entities formed, and trademarks transferred. A governing board (GB), technical advisory committee and marketing/outreach committee will all be formed and elected. We plan to do this over the coming months with the founding members and the O3DE community and make more announcements at O3DECon in October.

The Academy Software Foundation is a sister open source foundation at the Linux Foundation and primarily supports open source in the film industry. The two foundations will collaborate in areas where there is overlap, and the O3DE community plans to participate in future ASWF events.

O3DE is intended to run on multiple environments, clouds and operating systems… and part of the core mission of O3DE is to bring 3D engines to every possible environment. The most mature environment that O3DE runs on is Windows but other environments such as Linux and MacOS are planned to be supported, see here https://o3de.org/docs/user-guide/platforms