Open GL Interview Question:

Who needs to license OpenGL? Who doesnt?

Submitted by: Administrator

Companies which 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,
and IBM 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(R) 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.
Submitted by: Administrator