From: kipp@warp.asd.sgi.com (Kipp Hickman)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics.opengl
Subject: Re: OpenGl vs PEX
Date: 13 Oct 92 21:32:40 GMT
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.  Mountain View, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: warp.asd.sgi.com


In article <Bw2qv1.3uF@apollo.hp.com>, mcsavaney_d@apollo.hp.com writes:
> Kipp, I would appreciate being corrected here - my information shows the OpenGL
> pricing as follows:
> 
>  .A Level I license costs $25,000. The licensee receives the OpenGL 
>   specification and compliance suite, support information for licensees 
>   wishing to develop their own implementations, and the right to distribute 
>   such binaries to end users for a nondiscountable royalty of $5 per 
>   copy.
> 
>  .A Level II license costs $100,000. The licensee receives an ANSI C 
>   rewrite of the OpenGL specification,
>   an ANSI C implementation of OpenGL suitable for 
>   use as a porting base and an X server extension that understands 
>   the proprietary OpenGL protocol.
> 
> 
>  .A Level III license costs $300,000. The licensee receives the Level 
>   I and Level II deliverables plus the right to redistribute modified 
>   OpenGL source code to third parties who are already OpenGL source 
>   licensees".
My apologies.  :-(  Your table seems to be correct.  Please note that each
level is "independent".  You don't have to by level's 1 and 2 to then
buy number 3.  Also, please note that level 3 is really only for hardware
vendors who are required to ship source code to their implementations
(e.g., Dec, IBM, HP, Sun, etc.).  If you don't need to reship source, then
you don't need a level 3 license.  Sorry for the confusion :-( :-(

> Kipp, could can you please post the full price list. I am missing information
> about warranty length and support/maintanence costs; is the only support
> still remote telephone support at $260/hour? Also I am confused about
> opening multiple remote displays - does that count as a single application 
> and therefore falls under the $5 fee? Or does each display that is opened
> need to return $5 to SGI?
The cost, to the best of my clearly misinformed understanding is that the
worst case cost is $5 per seat, where a seat can have 1-N screens on it.
I am sure that the terms of the contract are quite explicit about this, with
lots of legalese to make it clear what is desired.  In any case, with most
licenses of this nature, it is common practice to buy away the per-seat
cost up front, as we have done with NFS, for instance.

> >
> >... Please remember
> >that free isn't really free.  For HP it effectively is because they can absorb
> >the engineering costs associated with turning the PEX-SI into something
> >useful (any bets on whether HP is actually using the PEX-SI at all? :-)
> 
> I think I understand that you think that software authors will find
> it less expensive to puchase OpenGL under the developer program
> and port to the platforms they need rather than aquire and port PEX?
> Is this so? If it is then, from personal experience, I think software
> authors are much more inclined to use a development environment
> that is supplied and fully supported by the platform hardware vendor,
> rather than take a "mix and match" approach.
What I am trying to say here is that just because you can get the pile of
bits from MIT that purports to provide a functional PEX implementation,
doesn't mean you can actually do anything with it for zero cost.  Therefore
its not truly free.  Somebody else posted a table something like this:

	PEX = $0 + development cost
	OpenGL = $100,000 + development cost

which is a fair and simple way of categorizing it.  My point is that unless
something strange happens in the land of computer science, the development
cost will overpower the cost of the source code.  The second point I will
make here is that the sample implementation of the OpenGL is complete,
unlike the sample implementation of PEX.  All features defined by the
OpenGL specification are supported, including:

	anti-aliasing
	perspective corrected texture mapping
	depth buffering
	stencil buffering
	accumulation buffering
	alpha testing
	alpha blending
	gouraud shading
	two sided lighting
	high quality fogging
	low quality fogging

How many of these features are provided for free with the PEX sample
implementation (I don't know, please tell me)?  If they aren't there,
how much development cost is it going to be to get them? Because if
you don't have them, you aren't going to be competitive in the future.

From what I have heard, the PEX sample implementation does not even include
the highly historical depth buffering, that most people take for granted
these days.

As before, these are my opinions.  For a change I am not speaking for all
of SGI :-)

					kipp hickman
					silicon graphics inc.