OpenGL to be sold?

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I saw this article/blog on businessreview online which features an interview with the SGI CEO. One of the things he says is that OpenGL might be sold as part of SGI’s restructuring. Considering how we are putting all our eggs in the OpenGL basket currently, with projects such as XGL, AIGLX and Glitz I hope this gets picked up by a friendly entity, especially if there are some patents still attached to OpenGL.

5 thoughts on “OpenGL to be sold?”

  1. Hm… I really hope there’s some financially potent someone/organization that can grab the OpenGL IP (and make it really open) before MS comes along and kills OpenGL. I’ve a very bad feeling about this. The Khronos group might be a good place for the new “home” of OpenGL.

  2. According to Wikipedia:

    The OpenGL specification is currently overseen by the OpenGL Architecture Review Board (ARB), which was formed in 1992. The ARB consists of a set of companies with a vested interest in creating a consistent and widely available API. Voting members of the ARB as of April 2006 include 3D hardware manufacturers SGI, 3Dlabs, ATI Technologies, NVIDIA and Intel, and computer manufacturers IBM, Apple Computer, Dell, and Sun Microsystems.

    Microsoft, one of the founding members, left in March 2003. Aside from these corporations, each year many other companies are invited to be part of the OpenGL ARB for one-year terms. With so many companies involved with such a diverse set of interests, OpenGL has become very much a general-purpose API with a wide range of capabilities.

    According to current plans, control of OpenGL will pass to the Khronos Group by the end of 2006. This is being done in order to improve the marketing of OpenGL, and to remove barriers between the development of OpenGL and OpenGL ES.

    —–

    So it looks like for now there’s already plenty of other forces to keep it going.

  4. Remember that what most of us are using on Linux isn’t actually OpenGL, but Mesa, which is an OpenGL-compatible library that can’t actually call itself “OpenGL” for various hand-wavey reasons.

  5. Mesa may not infringe on the copyright covering the original OpenGL code itself, but it can still infringe on patents that cover particular techniques used within OpenGL. So this might not be enough to protect Mesa.

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