twitter's Journal: FSF and SGI fix OpenGL Licensing Issues.

Today, The Free Software Foundation and SGI are announcing a clean up of OpenGL licensing. Previously OpenGL was released under SGI Free License B and the GLX Public License. The license now mirrors the free X11 license used by X.Org. The FSF had praise and thanks:

Peter Brown, FSF executive director, said, "We couldn't be happier with this decision, and we're very grateful to SGI for all their assistance. The FSF is committed to ensuring that everyone's computing tasks can be done with free software and this SGI code plays an important role in scientific and design applications and in the latest desktop environments and games."

SGI has technical details:

Previous SGI contributions to the free and open source community are now available under the new license. These contributions include the SGI® OpenGL® Sample Implementation, the GLX API and other GLX extensions. GLX provides the glue connecting OpenGL and the X Window System and is required by any OpenGL implementation using X.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Free Software Compliance Lab's Brett Smith warns that there are a few legal loose ends that need to be tied up before GNU/Linux distributions can utilize all the code base in freedom. There should be news about it early next week.

Great

[KasperMeerts]

If this helps in any way spreading OpenGL as an alternative 3D graphics API instead of DirectX, than that makes me very, very happy.

But to be honest, I don't understand how you can license an API.