FSF Resolves OpenGL Licensing Concerns with SFLC’s Help
January 14, 2009
SFLC was glad to advise FSF in its successful efforts to obtain full relicensing permission of SGI’s contributions to X.org. Now that the licensing has been clarified, all of the code 3D graphics under SGI’s older licenses are Free Software. SFLC applauds the work done by FSF, X.org and SGI on this matter, and especially commends FSF for their commitment to certainty in free software licensing.
Brett Smith, FSF’s Licensing Compliance Engineer, announced the news on the FSF blog:
A few months ago, SGI released a new version of the SGI Free License B. With that change, a lot of code used to provide 3D graphics on GNU/Linux systems was now free software. To make sure that all the code was free software, however, a few developers who worked on code released under a related license, the GLX Public License, needed to grant us permission to release their work under the new terms.
Earlier today I got great news from the X.Org project that they’ve obtained that permission from all the necessary developers. With that done, all of the code for 3D graphics originally released under one of SGI’s licenses is now free software.