OGC Announces New Trademark Licensing Fee

The Open Geospatial Consortium (MA, USA) has introduced a new trademark licensing fee structure that increases the value of membership for current members while making new membership more affordable. The OGC charges no fee for compliance testing software implementations to OGC specifications. Any organisation, whether an OGC member or not, can test their implementations. If an organisation wishes to advertise their product's compliance with one or more OpenGIS Specific-ations, the OGC does charge a trademark-licensing fee. Under the old fee structure, members paid a fee per product version, per specification tested and per year, with the fee amount based on the member's total gross annual revenue. Under the new fee structure, the amount of the fee is still based on gross annual revenue. However, OGC members now pay 20% less than before for each licensing fee.