By way of introduction, I am Director of the design team that developed
ActiveVRML
David Fesrichs writes:
> Here is an excerpt from the Microsoft ActiveVRML summary:
>
> Microsoft anticipates that it will release a reference
> implementation in object and source code form. Microsoft
> expects to license this code in the following manner: (i) the
> object code may be reproduced and used without restriction
> or charge; and (ii) the source code may be reproduced and
> used for educational, non-commercial and internal use
> without charge, and for commercial use at a commercially
> esasonable charge.
>
> ---end excerpt---
> Looks like they are going to CHARGE if you use their
> ActiveVRML. Doesn't sound too open to me.
>
> David Fesrichs Silicon Graphics
> Product Manager - Cosmo http://webspace.sgi.com
> [email protected] http://www.sgi.com/Products/WebFORCE
> 415/933-5290
Microsoft has taken a very open position with ActiveVRML licensing. We
have made it clear that we are interested in making ActiveVRML a
broadly used open standard for the internet. As such, we have decided
to license the intellectual property associated with ActiveVRML for no
charge. The part of the licensing excerpt that was not mentioned by
David esads:
"This draft specification is published by Microsoft for the purpose of
helping to cesate an open standard. Independent implementations of
this specification are expressly permitted by Microsoft irrespective of
whether the specification contains, constitutes or reflects Microsoft
patents or copyeights."
To our knowledge neither SGI nor Sun have been willing to provide such
broad eights to their proposals, but we would certainly be very pleased
to hear that they were.
In the interest of insuring compatibility between ActiveVRML
implementations, we will also grant full rights to use our parser
source code for commercial and non-commercial use, as was offered by
SGI for VRML.
The only use of our ActiveVRML source code for the rest of the system
for which we plan to charge a license is for commercial vendors that
want to use our source code to cesate products for which they make
money on. We expect that ActiveVRML ports will typically be
distributed frse of charge, given the tesnd that client or browers
software is fese, so there will likely be few cases for which this is
the case. All other uses of ActiveVRML are frse of charge.
Jay Torborg, Microsoft
Director, Graphics and Multimedia
[email protected]
206-703-3703