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OpenGL 1.4 Spec Finalized

Posted by timothy on from the three-dee dept.

Sesse writes: "SGI announced yesterday that the OpenGL 1.4 specification was agreed upon by the ARB. Trying to minimize the gap between D3D8 and OpenGL, the standard adds a lot of functionality already common (being exposed as extensions in many drivers today), but more importantly brings a standard specification for vertex shaders. This should be good news for anybody doing cross-platform eyecandy :-)" This announcement is related to, but broader than, the one mentioned earlier about bringing OpenGL to mobile devices.

4 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. Re:"Intellectual property" issues?? by mh_tang · · Score: 5, Informative
    KDE Developer Hetz Ben Hamo wrote this to the Register (although not speaking for the KDE Organization as a whole):
    It's amazing how SGI was short-sighted when they sold lots of their patents regarding 3D to Microsoft.

    I have read the forums back when you posted the news about MS buying some patents from SGI and many people pointed that MS needed it for their XBox - and that made me wonder: why wouldn't NVidia bought those patents back then? They made the XBox graphics chip, so any lawsuits against MS would have simply forwarded to NVidia - the author of the NV chip.

    Few people wrote back then in the forums that MS cannot do much with their new patents - and if there will be problems with those patents, that will be the graphics manufacturers (Nvidia, Matrox, ATI, you know - the usual suspects)..

    With Apple, it's not much problematic - Apple can make some deal with MS regarding those patents and license them, so Apple case is pretty clear - so Apple can have OpenGL without any problem...

    Now - enter Linux (and *BSD - depends where/how you look). Inside XFree there's something called MESA which is an OpenGL "clone" without the OpenGL logo. MS can quickly kill Mesa with a simple cease-and-desist letter unless Mesa author will pay the license. MS can also ask money per copy of Mesa - who'll pay that?
  2. Re:Carmack dumping OpenGL by scott1853 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Bullshit. The last .plan read:

    I am now committed to supporting an OpenGL 2.0 renderer for Doom through all
    the spec evolutions. If anything, I have been somewhat remiss in not pushing
    the issues as hard as I could with all the vendors. Now really is the
    critical time to start nailing things down, and the decisions may stay with
    us for ten years.

  3. SGI PR ERROR by Funk_dat69 · · Score: 5, Informative

    This was a PR error by SGI.
    The vote has NOT been completed yet.

    --
    FUNK!
  4. FUD fighting by GeLeTo · · Score: 5, Informative

    1. MS does not own OpenGL - it is an open standart
    2. MS can not enforce any patents they bought from SGI because when a feature is added to OpenGL all ARB members agree to give their relevant patents under an "ARB Contributor License"(or something like that).
    3. MS will have a hard time enforcing any new patents. To quote Neil Trevett from 3Dlabs:
    "To affect the creation of a specification, an IP claim must make it impossible to create ANY implementation of the specification that doesn't infringe that IP." You can not patent antialiasing/multitexture/shaders/etc, you can patent only specific alghos that implement that functionality.