SUNNYVALE, USA: As software developers the world over prepare to mark the 25th anniversary of the GNU System, Silicon Graphics, Inc. has announced it is releasing a new version of the SGI Free Software License B. The license, which now mirrors the free X11 license used by X.Org, further opens previously released SGI graphics software that has set the industry standard for visualization software and has proven essential to
GNU/Linux and a host of applications.

The announcement affects software created by SGI that forms the building blocks of many elements of today's gaming, visual computing, and immersive experiential technologies, including a wide range of proven visualization solutions provided by SGI.

Previous SGI contributions to the free and open source community are now available under the new license. These contributions include the SGI OpenGL Sample Implementation, the GLX API and other GLX extensions. GLX provides the glue connecting OpenGL and the X Window System and is required by any OpenGL implementation using X. GLX is vital to a range of free and commercial software, including all major Linux distributions.

SGI first released the software under a licensing model in 1999. But now SGI is pleased to release an updated version of the license that meets the free and open source software community's widely accepted definition of "free."

"SGI has been one of the most ardent commercial supporters of free and open source software, so it was important to us that we continue to support the free software development community by releasing our earlier OpenGL-related contributions under this new license," said Steve Neuner, director of Linux, SGI. "This license ensures that all existing user communities will benefit, and their work can proceed unimpeded. Both Mesa and the X.org Project can continue to utilize this code in free software distributions of GNU/Linux. Now more than ever, software previously released by SGI under earlier GLX and SGI Free Software License B is free."

Support from Free and Open Source community:

• "We couldn't be happier with this decision, and we're very grateful to SGI for all their assistance," said Peter Brown, executive director, Free Software Foundation (FSF). "The FSF is committed to ensuring that everyone's computing tasks can be done with free software and this SGI code plays an important role in scientific and design applications and in the latest desktop environments and games." (www.fsf.org)
• "Khronos applauds this move by SGI to adopt a new licensing model that will benefit the entire OpenGL community," said Neil Trevett,president of The Khronos Group, a member-funded industry consortium creating and evolving open standard APIs — including OpenGL. "It takes truly open standards to enable the authoring and playback of rich media on a wide variety of platforms and devices, and today's announcement shows real support for developers who rely on OpenGL, the planet's most widely deployed 2D and 3D graphics API." (www.khronos.org)