Oh the drama! The long-awaited OpenGL 3.0 spec has been released today after years of fruitless discussions in the ARB and Khronos Group, and - surprise - it is NOT the fresh and clean re-write that was promised, but instead only a minor release with a few extensions moved into the core feature set, and a few old features marked as depreciated. Nobody but the design commitee exactly knows what justifies the version number jump other then pretending progress.

In the old days of DX3 and DX5 I was a big fan of OpenGL, which was so much cleaner and easier to use compared to D3D. I still remember the horror of porting Urban Assault to DX5 in '97). I despised how Microsoft was completely rewriting the DirectX API every year. In hindsight that was their best decision, DX didn't have to care about old baggage and slowly got better until the excellent DX9, while the once elegant OpenGL was buried under a heap of vendor-specific extensions over the years, resulting in the mess it is today.

Somewhere inside I'm a bit sad to see OpenGL slowly dwindle into oblivion, on the other hand I didn't really care about it for the last 4 or 5 years (I think I stopped caring when I attempted to write an OpenGL renderer for Nebula2 and realized that I had to use a dozen-or-so extensions just to get DX9's core features).