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.