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SGI put out some increadibly cool technologies:

OpenGL - a very important 3D API

The Standard Template Library

VRML which gave rise to X3D Open Inventor which is a C++ wrapper around OpenGL.

Pretty purple boxen that were great in their day.

It seems that these came out years before the average user could really leverage them - years before anyone (including SGI it seems) knew what to do with them.

It seems a shame that such a brilliant company could have such a hard time making money. They made the world a better place though, IMHO.

Huh? Their software is still GPL so you can use it for free, but if you want to extend MySQL and keep the changes for yourself then you buy the commercial license. Same thing for the GUI toolkit Qt from Trolltech, or the 3D library Coin3D for instance.

The owners of the software gives you a choice between two licenses : GPL or a commercial one. So why all these complaints for software that they let you use for free?

One problem is that OpenGL (pre 2.0, haven't looked at that yet) is horrible to work with if you actually want to get stuff done. I'm using it in a game right now, and let me tell you, using a library with a stateful API is no fun.

OpenGL is stateful because 3D hardware is, and OpenGL always tried to be a thin layer on top of the hardware. Unfortunately, as you've noticed, state leakage becomes a real problem as soon as you start trying to build anything beyond a single static scene. It's just too much bother to keep track of all the state variables you have to save and restore as you traverse render nodes, particularly when the traversal order isn't predetermined. That is why SGI developed Inventor, which takes care of managing the details of state variables so you don't have to. You specify which state you want to carry over between render nodes and Inventor takes care of making sure that's the only state that carries over. Inventor isn't open source, but Coin is, sort of (the license seems to imply the GPLed version can't be sold, which would be an "additional restriction", incompatible with GPL).

Anyway, there's Open Scene Graph which is entirely open, and considerably advanced beyond Inventor.

QT does not support OpenGL widgits.

let me say this again for clarity:
QT is a great library. I also happens to support cross platform development in a very clean manner ( very few #IFDEFs ). As a bonus they have a nice license that allow you to play with if for free on linux. It supports OpenGL In the sence that they have a QGLWidget that allows you to do windowed OpenGL. It does not have any Graphical User Interface elements that display in its QGLWidget.

Considering how clean the QT code is I am sure there GUI could be 'ported' to OpenGL as a 'platform'. There is a package called SoQT that looks close to what I am describing. ( at least the beginning).

You could have a 4 headed G5 drive this thing... I set one up a few months ago. That plus a space mouse and you are in business. Now with 8 GB of ram and dual 2.5 GHz G5's. Very fun till you loose your mouse somewhere. Or you could go with Linux, Windows, or IRIX (if you want to pay big $$$).

IMO, Linux needs games in order to "make it" in the mass market. It already has the good O/S, it has the word processing software, it has GUIs if you want them - the only thing it doesn't have is a good games library.

I agree with you. However, just be patient, it's coming. It takes time to build a whole infrastructure capable of supporting the full lifecycle of a game development project. It takes time for massive numbers of independent developers to absorb the technical background and learn the skills to come up to the same level as a pro game developer. But look here and here and tell me it isn't happening. As open source developers, one thing we have is plenty of time. That means time to get it right, time to build best of breed tools, time to build a community of first hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of open source game developers. It's happening, I can assure you. Sooner than you think the worldwide programming talent pool for open source games will grow to exceed in numbers the largest commercial game company by an order of magnitude. What's more, that talent pool will include many professional game developers, working in their free time just because they love it, or they want to build their reputation. In that, game developers are no different than any other breed of open source developer.

But it takes more than programmers to make a game, it takes artists and game developers with both excellent skills and good taste. Right now, this side of the community lags way behind the programming side, but that too is a temporary situation. The artists will arrive when the tools are there, and the tools are well on their way. Note that the whole animation industry has basically switched to Linux. Sure, most of the software they're using is proprietary/expensive, but that's changing rapidly.

Although I stubornly refuse to work with RedHat after another one of their famous progressive actions, I think this one is from a different nature.
Unfortunately, I just admit, John Doe wants a simular look and feel for all the machines he is working on. Just try to explain the concept of Window Managers, and the layered structure (OS/X/WM).
Most ppl work with a "computer" and start a browser and some office program, they really do not care what it is running (but the sysadmins do). With Mozilla and OpenOffice.org, GNU/Linux finally seems to have mature solutions for this (FS/OS). For the first time in years (ever since the demise of WP), a user has again a choice what software to use for his/her "productivity" tasks with these mature solutions.
The only confusing thing is the desktop which has so many looks and feels. Imagine a secretary, used to work with KDE, working on a replacement machine and needs to start Mozilla in windowmaker
We should not see this as an attack on KDE of Gnome, but as a move to a common interface, at least for the non expert users. For the rest of us, we will keep starting several X servers with multiple window managers and compiling and packaging them from CVS.
I guess it's a corporate geek reflex that we do not like meddling with our software, but is general and widespread use (albeit eclectic with the best of the best) not the best recognition?

Heres some code (stolen from Coins configuration checking code

This code works great with normal optimisation. Try it with -O2, and it breaks.
Does that seem like a stable compiler?

Given that Bero says it only affects dynamically linked C++ code, thats a bit of crap, isn't it.

Check us out at www.coin3d.org.

Regards,
Morten (Coin developer)

Not quite right. VRML 1.0 was based on OI. VRML 2.0 is not and barely resembles it terms of capabilities.

In the end, both try to do the same thing: Scengraph based graphics representation, User programmable behaviours, customisable/extensible node types. They just do it in very different ways.

But I thought that TGS (template graphics systems) "owned" Inventor now...maybe they just licensed it and the contract just expired,

Correct. The interesting thing that I want to know is how does this news effect the Coin3D folks who already have an OSS (QPL) version of OI. They were showing this off at Siggraph and it looked pretty complete and very quick.

Coin and Open Inventor should have about the same functionality. Coin has a better configure/build system IMO, and has a Qt binding (and a Gtk binding in the works), and a couple of extra Linux-specific extensions like joystick4linux and video4linux textures (not in the main source archive).

There's been an effort to create an open inventor clone, called coin3d. Think along the lines of Mesa - same api, but unofficial. But what happens to them now? Or perhaps more importantly, what happens to the programming contest the parent company is sponsering to get people to use the toolkit? I want prizes, damnit!

Check this out

Coin