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Who the heck is Eric Masson?

Who am I?

  • Proud father of four, married for over 29 year, and grand dad of three

  • Canadian born and raised in Quebec

  • Started programming on a Commodore VIC-20 (in 1980) and never looked back.

  • Learned 6502 assembly since Basic was too limited for graphic. Extended his VIC-20  to a whooping 32Kb, then moved to C64, then Apple II, IBM PC, and the rest is history.

  • Big car guy, American muscle and fine German automotive. But deep down, a die-hard Mustang guy.

  • Traveled the world for work, and still quite a globe-trotter.

  • Speaks several languages and love Asian cultures.

  • Passionate about everything space, astrophysics, and the mysteries of the Universe.

  • Member of Harvard's Galileo Project science team since 2021.

  • Love good electronic music to the point of making his own and djing in clubs and after-hours. Visit  his Soundcloud or MixCloud pages.

  • His love and passion for SGI and 3D started with Daniel Langlois’s SoftImage, and the rest is history.

  • Had the privilege to work with SGI and helped many *companies with their interactive computer graphics and high performance computing challenges.

  • Veteran  C/C++ & Java developer,  software architecture, and now technical manager

 

Here’s  the "Official & Corporate" profile


Refer to Linkedin for detail

 

 

MaXX Interactive Desktop

Creator and author of the MaXX Interactive Desktop, referred by some as the SGI Desktop on Linux, 5Dwm or the Indigo Magic Desktop for Linux. I basically wrote it from scratch or by adapted existing open source projects to recreate the  SGI Desktop found only on IRIX systems.  It all started on the 15th of March of 2000, when Motif was released as Open Source. I finally had access to the core technology of SGI's Desktop and build my own. I was in Hong Kong back then and I can recall so vividly the countless nights and boat ferry rides to and from work hacking/adapting the OpenMotif code on my  Linux PowerPC black Mac PoweBook G3.  Didn't took long to reproduce the 4Dwm look and feel. Then I started to make my way into OpenMotif's widgets and adapt them to the distinctive SGI look. Maybe three/four months later, I started to work with SGI Hong Kong on some projects, the customer became somewhat of a solution consultant/partner.  The staff at SGI Hong Kong couldn't believe what they were seeing... A PC running RedHat Linux (with an accelerated X11+GLX) rocking Open Inventor side-by-side an Indigo2 MaxIMPACT with similar look and feel.  Of course the SGI box was dusting the PC, it was early 2000s.  

Soon enough the upper management at SGI's headquarter learned about my little endeavor... Funny enough SGI  was looking into expanding into Linux  and while  offering a Linux migration program for its customers.  It's not my place to say why SGI didn't do it themselves, but it was too complicated.  After several back and forth with SGI lawyer,  I was given a special license agreement that allowed me to pursue my project while respecting SGI trademarks and intellectual properties.  An alliance was forged, it was early 2005. The license agreement in a nutshell allows me to duplicate the entire desktop user experience, re-implement (by myself) the required SGI APIs and duplicate the SGI look and feel. To be clear, SGI never gave or share with me code or technical information. It was all reverse-engineered by running the Desktop on my SGI workstations and from public technical publications.

it is my decision to comply to the rules that were established  in license agreement. The MaXXdesktop is currently limited to Linux (x86-64) operating system and I cannot release some of my source code in order to protect  SGI’s intellectual properties, which are  *still forcefully protected, trust me on that. 

Having said that, things are moving forward and my wish to share the restricted code to the open source community will soon become a reality. This will allow the MaXXdesktop to officially support other operating systems  on a variety of CPU architectures .  It is a complicated issue and I want to play it safe and by the book. 

Finally, I started the process (with some help for a good friend) of releasing the new code that is not bound by the SGI license agreement to our public GitLab repositories.  This will happen on my terms, my way and not under GPL. Something simpler and less crusader's wanna be... BSD licensing that is.

 

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