Future of OpenGL (where does it belong to?)

[missile]

Greetings!

Does OpenGL belong to Microsoft, yet?
I've heart that MS takes over OpenGL and
now host a hugh amount of OpenGL.
If this is true, than how much influences
will MS take on OpenGL over the next years?
And what will SGI do for the future of
OpenGL?

I've heart about a jointventure with
nvidia & SGI. Does they plan a new graphic
language with new technologies?

I think, if the above assumtions are true,
than OpenGL goes over to MS (win) and
they will change the style of OpenGL the
way that it only runs "without" problems on
windows.

Any suggestions?

cu,
Robert

[jmg]

i'm curious about this too.

will opengl remain microsoft-free?...
is it microsoft-free now?

[MikeC]

OpenGL is controlled by the Architecture Review Board (ARB). Microsoft still has a seat on this board, but they don't really contribute a lot; as usual, they aren't particularly interested in supporting cross-platform solutions. The other board members include SGI, Sun, E&S, nVidia, ATI, 3Dlabs; the consumer-hardware ones have all joined in the last year or so.

OpenGL definitely does not belong to MS, nor will MS ever take it over. OpenGL is an abstraction of the low-level rendering process; it steers well clear of OS-specific issues, so it would be very hard to break it with the usual embrace-extend-and-make-incompatible approach.