Brian Paul to join Precision Insight

physic writes "Brian Paul, the maintainer and original author of the free OpenGL library called Mesa. will be joining Precision Insight to work on Linux/Mesa fulltime. Mesa is best know to the linux gaming community as the library that allows Quake3 to run under linux on 3dfx, nVidia TNT2, and Matrox G200/400 video cards. "

Comments

OpenGL Conformance and Mesa

[Oddhack]

There's a common misconception being expressed in this thread. The conformance tests cannot be used to test an API or a collection of source code, because conformance is a property of the actual driver binary and hardware being used. It is highly unlikely that (for example) software Mesa, the Matrox driver based on Mesa, and the Nvidia driver based on Mesa will all have the same conformance test results. Thus it is literally impossible to say that "Mesa is conformant", only that a particular driver based on Mesa is conformant.

That said, we did give Brian Paul access to the conformance tests for his own personal use, as an aid to improving Mesa.

There will be a great deal of OpenGL activity on Linux in the next few months, from SGI as well as others. Stay tuned. BTW, if anyone is thinking about going to the Open Source / Open Science conference at Brookhaven National Lab in October, I'll be speaking on OpenGL and Linux there (mostly a status update aimed at researchers, though).

Jon Leech
OpenGL Core Engineering
SGI