On Wed, 26 Jan 2000, Brad Grantham wrote:
> > From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Wed Jan 26 11:24:14 2000
> > So, what does this:
> >
> >
>http://www.quicken.com/investments/news/story/pr/?story=/news/stories/pr/20000126/sfw052.htm&symbol=SGI
> >
> > ...mean for the future of Mesa?
>
> I imagine (but do not know) that you still need to buy the license in
> order to get the conformance tests and use the OpenGL trademark.
>From reading the SGI OpenGL SI FAQ, that seems to be true.
> Which means that (for now) this is just another OpenGL-compatible open
> source library. There's a lot more work *freely available* right now
> for hardware accelerating Mesa. I'll be a lot more excited when I see
> hardware vendors open sourcing their OpenGL implementations.
Which (reading between the lines) may well be why SGI released this.
If (say) nVidia wanted to OpenSource their drivers, then before today,
they could not legally do so because they are (presumably) based on
the SGI reference implementation.
The reason for SGI to OpenSource this package could simply be a
necessary step to allow one or other of the other IHV's to release
their Linux drivers.
> In addition, I believe many Windows 98/NT ICD maintainers have an
> additional Microsoft license in their source code, so it will probably
> require a lot of legal and editing work before they can put out source
> for their OpenGL driver. For example, I don't think S3 can
> turn around today and open source their Windows driver.
Yep. I'm sure that's the case.
> This is very exciting, and I think it helps improve the strength of
> the OpenGL API on Linux and in general, but this is not nearly as
> useful or as interesting as people probably think.
Perhaps.
If the cross-license mess can be sorted out, then I think that
grabbing the imaging subset and Nurbs code (possibly all of GLU
actually) from the SGI code and stuffing it into Mesa would be
"A Good Thing".
I imagine that merging anything else from the SGI implementation
would do little to benefit Mesa directly.
As an application author, I'll certainly install it somewhere
just so I can compare how my program looks on SGI's SI with how
it runs under Mesa. This is always a useful way to try to ferret
out portability problems.
Steve Baker (817)619-2657 (Vox/Vox-Mail)
Raytheon Systems Inc. (817)619-2466 (Fax)
Work: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.hti.com
Home: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
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