In the current implementation (as of 2005-09-22) of the OpenGL graphics library in Windows Vista - a soon to be released new version of the Microsoft Windows operating system, OpenGL is not a stand alone library. Instead it functions as a wrapper around DirectX, and is frozen to the vanilla version of OpenGL 1.4.



This means that OpenGL applications in Windows Vista will, most likely, suffer from severe perfromance loss, that, when an OpenGL driver is loaded, the Windows operating system will have odd behaviours and that future versions of OpenGL will not affect the Windows Vista platform. This would result in less developers actively supporting OpenGL, and as a result, less applications written which are easy to port to another platform or easy to maintain.



This can still be changed. Either if Microsoft drops the current implementation - which is not a technical decision, but a political decision - or if Microsoft releases the information needed for third parties to write a new, functional driver for OpenGL.




This undersigned strongly encourage everyone who has anything to do with OpenGL, DirectX or Windows to put preassure on Windows to change this policy and to allow one of the two possible solutions to be carried out.



This petition will be send to Microsoft, ATI, nVidia, 3D Labs, Matrox, Apple and SGI once 100.000 people have signed. The reason for this relative low number is due to the technical nature of the problem.