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SGI Releases OpenGL As Free Software
StoneLion writes "Since its release, the OpenGL code that is responsible for 3-D acceleration on GNU/Linux has been running on licenses that were accepted by neither the Free Software Foundation (FSF) nor the Open Source Initiative. Today, however, the FSF has announced that the licenses in question have been rewritten, the problems resolved, and the code freed. Peter Brown, executive director of the FSF, says, 'This represents a huge gift to the free software community.'"
Great news for the community. Now lets hope this helps redirect resources, so I can get those laptop drivers fixed, and then I can finally sleep/hibernate properly!
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
There are still a number of patents covering portions of the OpenGL functions. Does this grant a license for use or are we stuck with partial implementations?
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2008/september/opengl.html
Free Software Foundation and Khronos Group Both Herald New License of Industry Standard Graphics Software
SUNNYVALE, Calif. (Sept. 19, 2008) â" As software developers the world over prepare to mark the 25th anniversary of the GNU System, Silicon Graphics, Inc. (NASDAQ: SGIC) today announced it is releasing a new version of the SGI Free Software License B. The license, which now mirrors the free X11 license used by X.Org, further opens previously released SGI® graphics software that has set the industry standard for visualization software and has proven essential to GNU/Linux® and a host of applications.
Today's announcement affects software created by SGI that forms the building blocks of many elements of today's gaming, visual computing, and immersive experiential technologies, including a wide range of proven visualization solutions provided by SGI.
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 GLXâ API and other GLX extensions. GLX provides the glue connecting OpenGL and the X Window Systemâ and is required by any OpenGL implementation using X. GLX is vital to a range of free and commercial software, including all major Linux distributions.
SGI first released the software under a licensing model in 1999. But now SGI is pleased to release an updated version of the license that meets the free and open source software community's widely accepted definition of "free."
"SGI has been one of the most ardent commercial supporters of free and open source software, so it was important to us that we continue to support the free software development community by releasing our earlier OpenGL-related contributions under this new license," said Steve Neuner, director of Linux, SGI. "This license ensures that all existing user communities will benefit, and their work can proceed unimpeded. Both Mesa and the X.org Project can continue to utilize this code in free software distributions of GNU/Linux. Now more than ever, software previously released by SGI under earlier GLX and SGI Free Software License B is free."
Interfaces are one of the most important things in modern software creation. Interfaces are often established by implementations. This change by SGI makes sure OpenGL will stay used and even wider adopted. As far as I can see, it is the only graphics library standard that has the potential for long-term usage.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Don't be a jerk about it. From the article.
"Someone came to me on IRC and asked if people should start sending angry faxes to SGI, telling them to please clean up their licenses. And I was like, 'No, that's not the right message right now.' We were trying to avoid that kind of reaction, because among the people in the GNewSense community, there was a visceral reaction initially, and it took some time for people to realize that we needed to give them a chance. And it really paid off. SGI was very willing to work with us throughout the entire process.""
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The link to the GLX public license lists version 1.0 which seems to still have the problematic clauses.
I'm surprised that opengl was never really 'open'. It now makes sense why it wasnt a part of glibc and/or xfree86 until recently.
The opening of video card drivers and now opengl are major steps in the success of linux on the desktop (and for gamers).
Just imagine, we can now add opengl to Heretic and Command and Conquer, and it can all still be very much free. I can't wait for when I can port Halflife2 to Linux.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Without wishing to piss on anyone's parade, I'm not so sure this is such a great thing....let me explain...
The fundamentals of OpenGL and Direct3d is it a standard agreed on by software developers and hardware vendors alike right? While it's great this is now free, if one target now diversifies into a hundred different variations, you can be sure the likes of NVidia and ATI drop it completely.
Don't get me wrong, I do support the FOSS philosophy but in this case I'm not convinced it's such a great move?
throw new NoSignatureException();
Complaining? About what? For Nvidia, what you would be looking for is PureVideo HD. I know that the Geforce 8600gt has it, and you can get that for about $80.
Um, OpenGL already has a documented extension mechanism that is widely used, by virtually every vendor, to provide documented and open access to their extensions. Changing the licensing on one implementation of the standard will not increase the fragmentation of OpenGL, and fragmentation of OpenGL has not led nVidia and ATI to drop it.
In fact... looking at the listed extensions I see 15 _ATI_ extensions and 54 _NV_ extensions. :)
I'm building a media display machine and I want 1080p and 3d support. Is there a card that just works?
I've gotten results with a Radeon HD3450 running an HDMI to a 1080p TV. It took a little tweaking, especially of accursed X configuration files, but the standard ATI driver works.
The response to the latest opengl release has been, to put it mildly, underwhelming. A number of opengl developers in the blogs I have read have declared intentions of moving over to directx. This is the way for opengl developers to get a bigger share of the open source developer mindshare and development effort to make up for the egg they laid earlier this year.
This wont magically solve your driver issues.
This wont magically port your game to opengl.
The openGL headers have always been available to compile against.
This is the source for the reference implementation of openGL. It would be of interest if your planning on writing a 3D 'rendering' engine (not 3d game engine) from scratch, or are interested in how the opengl stack works.
FYI, mesaGL's source has always been readily available and is based off SGI's implementation.
...your move.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I am sorry, but someone has to ask. If you had told me that this happened five six years ago, I would be ecstatic, as this would have proven to be a worthy deterrent to Microsoft's DirectX, which was lagging behind OpenGL adoption.
But with DirectX with what 90% of the market(?), I fear its too little, too late. SGI, though one of the icons of the past, has had to suffer from people at the top in late 90s who had really not much vision as to how the PC world was going to pan out over the next few years and was really caught unaware when OpenGL went the way of the doodoo.
But hey, SGI was still the only place then who had Aeron chairs (this from a friend of mine who was gracious enough to invite me to their awesome lunch cafe).
Rapid Nirvana
they should fix the GLUT license.
... How often do we see an article on SGI here that doesn't either forecast their demise or have updates on their latest bankruptcy filing?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
90% of which market? 90% of the PC games market, maybe. But OpenGL is widely used in professional 3D Applications and is an industry Standard there.
At least for the gaming market.
If they'd done this back when DirectX was just beginning and OpenGL was actually relevant, things would be much different now.
As it is, DirectX went on to beat OpenGl soundly.
This might have some bigger effect on the non gaming graphics applications (CAD and 3D stuff), but for gaming it's just irrelevant now.
I know you might say "Well, it means I can finally play (Insert game from the year 2000 on Linux!", but for 99% of gamers out there, Linux is still irrelevant.
There were two licenses listed as having problems, that's only one of them.
I can get those laptop drivers fixed, and then I can finally sleep/hibernate properly!
I've never heard of ACPI depending on an API for generating polygons, but hey whateva.
In short ACPI will take care to shut down and turn back on the power consumption of the PCIe bus. But on wake up, the *graphic drivers* will take care that everything, including the content of the graphical memory, etc. return to the exact same state, as if the 3D application running where never interrupted.
Giving an opensource OpenGL 3.x leaves more time for the developers for other parts of the drivers : to develop a nice DRI2/TTM/GEM underneath fixing low level problems like sleep/wake-up among other.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You're just angry because we still have two triangles, and you could only steal one! Run off to Japanese Affricka already.
A vernal pool! Maybe if I use a floot, it'll reveal a secret.
Thanks, FSF! I appreciate the work you do to promote free software, and this is another great example.
Depends what you are looking for. I use it in my xbmc and it works fine but my amd processor does most the work as far as decoding.
That doesn't seem to be changing:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=106584
Also, there is no timetable (or even a commitment) to support OpenGL 3
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=117937
Nvidia does not support PureVideo HD in linux.
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=106584
settle for the lesser of two weasels.
So, will the CAD and Gaming markets diverge?
When OpenGL 3.0 came out 5 weeks ago, there was much talk about new features that had been shown and old stuff had been dumped, and then all of that was tossed because of needed backwards compatibility for the CAD software. Is this maybe a chance for the gaming crowd to get the new stuff, developed by a collaboration between AMD, Intel, nVidia (if they're interested) and any game makers and other open source companies that want to participate in a more open API.
If this happens, more companies might start writing their games for the new standard (I assume they'd take on a new name, and OpenGL would be the name for the Professianal Version) so they can easily port to the growing Mac and Linux markets, and between PC and consoles.
Anyway, this is great to see. I can't wait to see what sorts of improvements come out of this.
SGI is a company much weaker than it was when it first released OpenGL and drove it. Microsoft has no use for OpenGL, and so now, we have OpenGL being offered up as free software? This can be spun as having an "open license" as much as we want, but to me it looks more like OpenGL is really without any serious corporate sponsorship.
This is my sig.
Doomsday. And other DOOM-related engines. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I must chime in that I applaud the FSF's effort in this event in that:
1) they did not use guerilla tactics
2) they dealt with SGI on friendly terms
3) and most importantly, did not appear to force the use of the GPL.
In light of the crazy bad ideas that they've attempted recently (like DDOSing Apple stores), I consider this a sign that they're willing to attempt to regain my trust.
when a company releases code to the open source community, how do the original developers feel?
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The article discusses the OpenGL licensing and legalities, but what about the released code? Where is it? What site? What repository?
That was a good explanation, thanks, and it explains Mesa's position well. The Mesa project has never claimed that their product was OpenGL, nor that it was validated, but only that it was written to be compliant with the OpenGL specification.
But nVidia isn't in that boat --- they've always claimed that they were delivering OpenGL.
Does this announcement mean that nVidia's OpenGL is now free software then, because of SGI's automatic license update clause? That would be so fantastically wonderful that I'm sure it's not the case, but if not, how come that the license update doesn't apply to them? Are nVidia not supplying OpenGL by license from SGI?
While this probably wouldn't apply to nVidia's extensions to OpenGL, any modifications to SGI's OpenGL would constitute a derived work which would still be under SGI's license.
Please check exactly what is covered by the SGI B and GLX licenses before you shout "Awesome!". The truth is, very little is covered.
All they've really tidied up to the FSF's satisfaction are the licenses on the GL and GLX headers and machine-readable specification documents, which are used in many FOSS bindings. It has also fully freed up SGI's sample OpenGL implementation, but that is 8-year old abandonware, and not used by anyone for anything.
This improvement in the license is undoubtedly helpful, but mainly to license Nazis, not to engineers.
It provides nothing new to anyone actually working with OpenGL, since the only working FOSS implementation of OpenGL (but unvalidated) is still Mesa 3D, which isn't dependent on SGI's license. nVidia's OpenGL implementation appears to be their own and not licensed from SGI (as far as we know), so nVidia OpenGL is not freed up by this relicensing --- they probably only license the OpenGL trademark from SGI (and that's a code-free SGI license).
So no, it's substantially less than awesome, since we still have no fully-accelerated OpenGL. And nothing changes, in practice, as a result of this announcement. (Check out #OpenGL on freeenode to see how underwhelmed everyone in the GL community is.)
What we really have here then is just a "PR success" which helps SGI and helps the FSF, but doesn't really do anything of significance.
What will definitely be "awesome" news for OpenGL+FOSS is when the FOSS community finally turns all that documentation we received from AMD and Intel and Via (but not from nVidia) into accelerated 3D drivers to work with a Mesa-based OpenGL. But that's a shitload of work (and our guys *ARE* working very hard at it), and so working systems won't be with us for several years yet.
So, sorry, not awesome, just PR.