This posting over at Slashdot mentions that MS is claiming Intellectual Property rights to portions of OpenGL.

The discussion thread seems to suggest that it may not make a difference…or it may…but in all cases: We’ll just have to wait and see.

OpenGL (for you who’ve forgotten) is a layer over the graphics card in your system. It’s meant to take a general series of commands and make them work with your video card.

That’s helpful since not all video cards are the same and implement different things in different ways. Having a common standard (like DirectX and OpenGL) allows fancy new games to be written that work on all video cards.

Yet, there are still some games that won’t work on certain cards. It’s all part of the trickery of game releasers and the companies that make video cards.

For instance: If I’m a smalltime developer and I come up with some cool game that’s not really going to make it big, I package it off to one of these large companies and they release it with their video card. Trick is that it only works with their card since the game looks sweet since it’s only made for that card (doesn’t have to deal with OpenGL and can make some very fast calls to the graphics chip). TRICKERY…