Good post, Robert -- What specific ideas do you have for supporting OpenGL? The ARB has a marketing subgroup that might be interested in hearing about our desire to help out. Just off the top of my head, I imagine some kind of press release from "the OpenSceneGraph community", perhaps signed/endorsed by several of us here on the list, which might get some visibility on opengl.org and khronos.org, maybe some other places as well.
Paul Martz Skew Matrix Software LLC http://www.skew-matrix.com +1 303 859 9466 -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Robert Osfield Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 2:33 AM To: OpenSceneGraph Users Subject: Re: [osg-users] OFT: Interesting commentary of the future of OpenGL Hi All, Wow, I was expecting a few more bodies to show some support for MS + Direct3D... so far it's just Gordon's clients... Excellent article Paul, I agree pretty well 100%. I would love MS to properly support OpenGL and not fight it like they have done so for the last decade. The introduction of Direct3D and MS's manipulation of the market has done a great deal of damage to the quality of OpenGL drivers. Hardware vendors having to field two sets of driver teams, is not sensible at all, and thanks for the MS's market clout and throwing it's wait around we have hardware vendors that do a pretty shoddy job on the OpenGL side. MS agenda over the last twenty years has been about having control over API's and "standards" that other software companies build upon. It's about build a whole MS centric eco-system, and crushing means of moving out to alternative systems. It's a honey trap, invite vendors in with promise of great API's and gains in productivity, then lock them in your eco-system. MS is not alone is trying this, but there have been uniquely successful at it. For me OpenGL's weakness on Windows is not that it does advance faster enough (we struggle to keep up latest extensions of versions) or that it's not efficient enough, OpenGL 2.x + extensions matches up with Direct3D 10.0 pretty comfortably and we have all this lovely functionality on all platforms where hardware/drivers support it, no the weakness is not in the OpenGL specification but in it's implementation by some hardware vendors. If the OpenGL implementations were universally reliable then Direct3D would really have nothing but marketing to prop it up. I think the only way that MS would give OpenGL an equal footing in Windows would be for an anti-trust case to come up that forces them. The current browser case in Europe is very specific, as was the media and server cases before them. The case of MS trying to destroy OpenGL is really no different and deserves a anti-trust case. Such anti-trust cases don't really help us right away though, so previous ones have done little to bring things back to a level playing field, and they always take many many years to go through. What is needed right now is for us and the hardware vendors to whole heartily support OpenGL. In this direction, perhaps it's time we started coordinating better to make noise publicly about support for the OpenGL family. Robert. _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
