SGI Gives Open Source some OpenGL Love

Doctor Bob writes "Just saw this press release from SGI. I think this quote sums it up: "With today's release, all of the necessary components to implement hardware-accelerated OpenGL drivers will be available to the open source community." " The implementation from SGI is ready for download from SGI. Have fun.

Comments

Re:SGI vs X4 vs Mesa

[nellardo]

XFree, being an implementation of an X server, has pretty much nothing to do with OpenGL. There are two limited ways they deal with each other:

• They both draw stuff to the framebuffer, and...
• GL can cooperate with an X server by using the GLX extension to X. GLX basically moderates contention for the graphics hardware between X and GL.

Mesa is an implementation of the OpenGL API. So is SGI's OpenGL® Sample Implementation. In fact, the reason SGI first started calling it "Open" (instead of simply "GL" for "Graphics Library") was because they cleaned up and published the API, then gave people permission to implement it.

As has been posted elsewhere on this thread, SGI is making vague noises about OpenGL and Mesa merging. This would be a wonderful example of how open source licenses actively discourage forking (as discussed in the context of the GPL in Linuxcare back in November).

If you want to know more about the hoary guts of OpenGL, and not just the API, I'd suggest looking up some of Akeley's articles on the hardware from prior SIGGRAPH proceedings.

Both Inventor and Performer are toolkits developed by SGI to run on top of OpenGL and simplify application development. Inventor is targeted more at interactive applications, like modelers (I wrote one in Inventor before it was released in less than five days, having never seen the library before - see Paul Strauss's and Rikk Carey's SIGGRAPH paper). Performer is targeted more at walkthroughs, flight simulators, and the like.

What will happen to Mesa?

[Oddhack]

What will happen to Mesa now? Who will assimilate who?

It's not obvious that anybody will necessarily assimilate anybody. Let me be perfectly clear that we are not doing this to "kill Mesa" or anything idiotic like that. Mesa has a lot of good stuff in it and, unlike the Sample Implementation, there are some open source Mesa hardware drivers available today. On the other hand, the SI does some things that Mesa does not, and almost all closed source hardware drivers are based off the SI - so companies who choose to open source their own drivers in the future will be able to do so now.

There are a lot of ways we may be able to share code and work together, and we've been in touch with Brian Paul about this for quite a while. None of us know exactly how this is going to work out, but we are talking and we all realize it's important to work this out.

Jon Leech
OpenGL Group
SGI

Re:But OpenGL won't be open-source

[Oddhack]

I don't know how you could consider it not open source; please read the license.

Being "GPL-compatible" is a red herring. Mesa is now under the X license, and the Sample Implementation we just released is under a license designed to be compatible with the X license, in both cases for the same reason: so that the code can be incorporated into XFree86. XFree86 is, if you will, "GPL-incompatible" and that is a conscious decision by the XFree86 project.

If you have questions about our licensing, please check the FAQ. It goes into a lot more detail.

Jon Leech
OpenGL Group
SGI

yay!

[Dalroth]

You know, I *REALLY* like what IBM and SGI are doing lately. I mean, these companies have their act together. They are taking a higher road that few companies are willing to transverse right now. Despite IBM's shaky history, they really seem to have turned it around (and God bless Blue Labs and everything that has come out of it). SGI is another good example, remember their lawsuit with NVIDIA? Well, rather than carry through with the lawsuit, they decided to work with NVIDIA, and share their technologies instead of bickering over stupid patents and thus ensuring BOTH companies have a bright future not tied up in litigation.

This is the way things should work. Slashdot has been really depressing lately. All the patent infringement and privacy issues that have been wearing down on me, and I've questioned a few times why I continue to read Slashdot (afterall, who wants to spend their day depressed). Every once in a while though, something like this comes along and gives me some hope.

Oh, one last thing while I'm on my podium... I would like to see just a little bit less coverage of these patent infringement/privacy type news posts and get a little more of the science and programming content we used to get. I know this stuff is important, and I don't want to see it go away, but the other content has been a bit barren lately (and what happened to quickies? They come once a month if that now).

Thanks for the hard work and great web site.

sgi still won't be able to support itself

[TheGratefulNet]

I worked for sgi for a little over 2 yrs. not all that long, but long enough to see the decline of sgi at its during its prime pinnacle.

it was the coolest company I ever worked for. the spirit and atmosphere was unmatched (talking about life on the mtn view campus). I look back at those times with a smile on my face - and a tear in my eye for what it let itself become.

sgi does cool stuff. problem is, they price themselves out of the market and since the market has changed drastically (ie, graphics workstations are now sub-$2k and linux clusters can be built that outperform the o2000 line for a fraction of the price) their business model didn't adapt - so it dies.

I watched the birth and ultimate death of the NT box (called 'wbt', internally; wintel box thing). I saw cray being bought, then attempted to be assimilated, then ultimately thrown away. irix, once a reasonably resilient (albeit somewhat incompatible) version of unix, is essentially dead. the MIPS cpu is essentially dead, with sgi selling its soul to Intel and hoping the merced will save its sorry ass. custom graphics hardware may also be dead at sgi. so what's left? linux??? will sgi attempt to convert from a hardware company that leverages software, to a software-only company?

again, I love sgi and wish them well. but in the last 4 yrs or so, they've demonstrated they know nothing about how to adapt to the New World Order of computing (cost models and such). trying to hang on by rallying behind "the linux thing" is just too little, too late. and there's just not enough profit in it to support the giant that they still are (building- and people-count wise).

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