MSDN’s OpenGL documentation is for OpenGL 1.1; that’s the “legacy” here.
Do you honestly think that MSDN filing OpenGL under “legacy graphics” has anything to do with what version they directly support? They support the latest versions of GDI and GDI+, yet those are also considered “legacy graphics” APIs.
In the Vista situation it was always clear that full OpenGL support would be present with a vendor-provided ICD. Certain more hysterical corners of the internet got considerable mileage out of claiming otherwise.
Source for the latter: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kamvedbrat/archive/2006/02/22/537624.aspx
That’s not a source for your claim that “it was always clear that full OpenGL support would be present with a vendor-provided ICD.” That’s simply a source that says that Vista would support ICD. Whether that was “always clear” is something that you have yet to show.
Yes, some people did continue to ignore this once it was clarified. But that doesn’t mean people did not rightfully have fears before Microsoft actually provided information about what was going on. Especially with all of the other changes to the Windows graphics driver model that came with Vista.
So any kind of suggestion that Microsoft might do to OpenGL for Windows 8 what they tried to do with Vista is actually a good thing, because it means that they will support it fully. To imply otherwise is… well, FUD.
Except that we already know that there is at least one SKU of Windows 8 that will have no OpenGL support. Namely, the ARM port. Also, none of the other “legacy graphics” APIs will be supported on Win8-ARM. Maybe that’s why they put them in a box called “legacy graphics.”
Is it still “FUD” if it’s actually a reasonable fear with substantive evidence behind it? Microsoft is already starting to cull old things from at least one OS; why is it unreasonable to believe that they might do it from another?
In any case, NVIDIA loves OpenGL enough that they would probably back-door Microsoft’s attempts to remove it if they tried, by providing their own equivalent of the ICD model or some-such (as is done with OpenCL).