Re: Open Inventor now LGPLed

[Lauris Kaplinski <lauris helixcode com>]

On Tue, 15 Aug 100, Andy Tai wrote:

> Hi, this is not currently GNOME specific, but I think worth mentioning...
> 
> SGI has released Open Inventor, the most advanced 3D graphics API built on top
> of OpenGL, under the GNU LGPL.  This provides an important component for a 
> multimeida desktop environment, a easy-to-use, high-level, object-oriented 3D
> graphics API (OpenGL is rather low-level). VRML-type graphics on GNU/Linux 
> now is a piece of cake.  Among all the news of the GNOME Foundation, 
> Open Inventor can form an important part of the future of GNU/Linux and GNOME.

OpenInventor has one big misfeature, common to many other API 
libraries. It is implemented in C++.

It has C bindings - yes - but according to specification you can derive
new classes only in C++. I.e. not in C, not in Python, not in
perl... Which means, that if you need more than preexisting classes, your
developing language is fixed.

Lauris