DmitryKo
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http://www.khronos.org/news/press/Releases/opengl_ar…to_khronos_group/
http://www.opengl.org/pipeline/article/vol001_1/
OpenGL ARB to Pass Control of OpenGL Specification to Khronos Group
Significant roadmap synergy and close cooperation under a single body will enable OpenGL family of standards to accelerate advanced 3D deployment on diverse platforms
31st July, 2006 - SIGGRAPH, Boston, Massachusetts - The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that the OpenGL® ARB (Architecture Review Board), the governing body for OpenGL, has voted to transfer control of the OpenGL API standard to the Khronos Group. The Khronos Group has voted to establish an OpenGL Working Group that will control and evolve this vital standard for cross-platform 3D graphics with significantly enhanced participation as ARB companies join over one hundred Khronos members involved in creating open standards for dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms. The full transfer of the OpenGL specification to Khronos is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2006 with full support for the OpenGL API and its evolution to continue uninterrupted during this transition with full updates on both http://www.opengl.org and http://www.khronos.org.
The OpenGL ARB and the Khronos Group have long collaborated to ensure consistency in the OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenML, COLLADA and OpenGL SC standards. As a result of this transition all OpenGL specification-related activities will now occur under the single Khronos participation framework to enable fully-integrated cooperation between these related standards activities so that the OpenGL family may form the foundation for a coherent set of standards to bring advanced 3D graphics to all hardware platforms and operating systems - from supercomputers to jet fighters to cell phones. The multi-track Khronos organization ensures a constructive balance between inter-working group synergy while still enabling each working group to make focused decisions to meet the needs of its own target market.
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This transition will enable Khronos to coordinate a joint roadmap strategy for OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenGL SC and COLLADA specification to maximize synergies between the various members of the OpenGL API-related standards family to accelerate its architectural evolution to support advanced programmable features while minimizing differences between diverse platforms. Additionally, COLLADA will be enabled to form a vital link to authoring platforms for both OpenGL and OpenGL ES standards, and Khronos will be able to leverage work in its cross-platform EGL standard to augment and perhaps eventually replace the GLX/WGL/AGL platform-specific variations.
“As a long-time Promoter Level member of the Khronos Group and the OpenGL ARB, ATI strongly supports the transition of the OpenGL specifications and workgroups to the Khronos Group,†said Robert Feldstein, vice president, engineering, ATI Technologies. “The communities for OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenVG, and other Khronos standards will enjoy the advantages of working more directly together. We envision that OpenGL will continue to evolve into a coherent family of APIs focused on bringing advanced graphics processing everywhere.â€
“This transition ensures OpenGL’s rightful place as the foundation for advanced 3D graphics on almost every platform in the industry as we combine the intellectual firepower of the ARB OpenGL architects with the significant commercial momentum of OpenGL ES,†said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA strongly supports this next step in OpenGL’s evolution as we see both desktop and mobile industries benefiting from an integrated roadmap for OpenGL, OpenGL ES and COLLADA.â€
http://www.opengl.org/pipeline/article/vol001_1/
The ARB was set up to govern OpenGL, drawing on a group of high-end workstation and simulator manufacturers: DEC, Evans and Sutherland, HP, IBM, SGI, and others. But in the late 1990s, graphics hardware started to get cheaper, pervasive, and eventually much more capable, thanks to a new generation of companies like 3dfx, 3Dlabs, ATI, and NVIDIA. The ARB membership has reflected this change. Most of the innovations in OpenGL today come from those “consumer graphics†companies.
Now 3D acceleration is moving to cell phones, and OpenGL is there, too, as OpenGL ES, a subset of OpenGL created in the Khronos Group. Khronos is an entity similar to the ARB, but more widely focused, developing authoring (Collada), digital media/imaging (OpenMAX and OpenML), 3D (OpenGL ES), 2D (OpenVG), and sound (OpenSL ES) APIs.
We’ve decided that the future health of OpenGL—in all its forms—will be best served by moving OpenGL into Khronos, too. There are many advantages, such as:
- The OpenGL and OpenGL ES groups can communicate under the same set of intellectual property rules. IP rules are to standards like dental checkups are to you: unpleasant, but essential to avoid pain in the future.
- OpenGL and OpenGL ES might converge back into a single API. Mobile devices have grown more powerful and added back many features missing from OpenGL ES 1.0. And with programmable graphics pipelines common, we may be ready to phase out redundant and legacy features from OpenGL.
- The OpenGL group can work closely with other APIs in Khronos. For example, we might eventually replace the GLX/WGL/AGL APIs with EGL, a cross-platform equivalent developed in Khronos.
- The OpenGL group and the rest of Khronos can pool efforts on SDKs and documentation. For example, the OpenGL extension registry will grow into a registry for all the Khronos APIs.
- Finally, OpenGL and Khronos can more efficiently share administrative, logistical, and website support from the Gold Standard Group.
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