Who needs to license OpenGL? Who doesn ?
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.