Licensing Information

Companies that will be creating or selling binaries of the OpenGL library will need to license OpenGL. Typical examples of licensees include hardware vendors, such as Digital Equipment, IBM, and Silicon Graphics who would distribute OpenGL with the system software on their workstations or PCs. Also, some software vendors, such as Portable Graphics and Template Graphics, have a business in creating and distributing versions of OpenGL, and they need to license OpenGL.

Applications developers do NOT need to license OpenGL. If a developer wants to use OpenGL, that developer needs to obtain copies of a linkable OpenGL library for a particular machine. Those OpenGL libraries may be bundled in with the development and/or run-time options or may be purchased from a third-party software vendor, without licensing the source code or use of the OpenGL(TM) trademark.

Since many implementations will be a shared library on a hardware platform, the royalty sometimes will be charged for each hardware platform. In those cases, it would not be charged for each application which used OpenGL.

In general, licensing a source code implementation of OpenGL would not be useful for an application developer, because the binary created from that implementation would not be accelerated and optimized to run on the graphics hardware of a machine.

If you need a license or would like more information, call Mason Woo at +1-415-390-4205 or e-mail him at woo@sgi.com. There are licenses available restricted to university usage, restricted to commercial site (local) usage, or permitting redistribution of binary code. Some license levels provide the source code for a sample implementation of OpenGL.