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By Alex Handy

September 19, 2008 — SGI, which maintains the OpenGL code for 3D modeling and rendering, has come to an agreement with the Free Software Foundation (FSF) over OpenGL's licensing. Today, the company announced that it has rewritten its SGI Free Software License B to more closely resemble the licenses behind X.Org, the windowing software for Linux desktops.

The FSF has been declaring that the SDI's GLX Public License and SGI Free License B were legally problematic since 1999. It pointed out numerous flaws in the licenses that would have put users in double jeopardy for any export violations and would have caused issues around unrestricted distribution.

"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 at 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."

In a recent audit of Linux kernel contributions, SGI was found to have donated enough patches to the operating system to be the 10th most prolific patching entity in the process, contributing more than other Linux distributions and companies had contributed.

Related Search Term(s): licenses, Linux, open source, Free Software Foundation, SGI

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