December 6, 2004, Wayland, Massachusetts. The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) announces a new trademark licensing fee structure (see http://www.opengeospatial.org/resource/testing) 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 of OGC specifications, and any organization, whether an OGC member or not, can test their implementations. If an organization wishes to advertise their product's compliance with one or more OpenGIS(R) Specifications, 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 a fee is still based on gross annual revenue. However, OGC members now pay 20% less than before for each licensing fee. In addition, for levels of membership from Technical Committee Member up through Strategic Member, there are increasingly favorable ceilings on the number of trademark licensing fees that the member must pay for. Therefore, members can reduce their overall trademark licensing fee costs by moving to a higher level of membership.Many OGC members have multiple products and multiple implementations that can enjoy the benefits of OGC branding. The new schedule provides an incentive to make more products compliant with the OpenGIS® Specifications, because, after paying the licensing fee on the first few products, there is no extra per-product cost associated with this marketing benefit.Associate Members, those who pay the lowest membership fees and the lowest fees per license, will continue to pay 20% less for trademark licensing than non-members in the same revenue bracket. The non-member fee is only $100/year/license for small organizations.The OGC is an international voluntary consensus standards organization of 250 companies, government agencies and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geoprocessing interface specifications. OpenGIS® Specifications support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT.###”