Those nice people over at Gnome, the GNU Object Model Environment open source desktop project, were a little perturbed by the revelation in my interview with SGI’s CEO Dennis McKenna that OpenGL is up for sale.
Christian Schaller writes: “Considering how we are putting all our eggs in the OpenGL basket currently, with projects such as XGL, AIGLX and Glitz I hope this gets picked up by a friendly entity, especially if there are some patents still attached to OpenGL.”
I wonder how many other projects and companies would be affected by the sale of OpenGL, depending on whom it gets sold to? More comments from Gnomers here, though the comment from Alexander Boström that, “‘Silicon Graphics Inc has transferred much of its 3D graphics patents portfolio to Microsoft.’ So it might already have happened…” is off the mark – they did indeed sell various 3D patents but not OpenGL (yet).
