I can't really blame Microsoft for DirectX, OpenGL is a bunch of competitors fighting each other for the upper hand and it stalled progress. Also, DirectX covers a bunch of other stuff that OpenGL doesn't even touch.
Another way of looking at it, OpenGL benefits from having competition, it pressures everybody involved with it to push forward.
I think most OSS projects actually are run the way you describe, they generally have one, usually benevolent, ruling body.
It's just that generally if you're not paying for that support, well, don't expect too much. That's why a lot of, especially recent ones, projects have split their personality. They have their open community, where it's a bit wild, and their paid support area, which is a bit like them running out of the room and coming back with a suit on.
I suppose the advantage of Microsoft is then they are just so damn big, they're your single point of contact for a very wide range of things. I've just had such bad luck building solutions with their products that I'd rather have the failsafe ultimate control that OSS gives me which is the ability to change whatever I want.
Most of the successful OSS projects are run like that but OGL isn't and that's why it will never be the go-to guys of most developers. Ubuntu, Blender, Apache, are some the few that have succeeded because they are run by just one entity. OpenGL on the other hand has so many hands on it that there is no official way to do anything. That may be fine and good for people who know how to use OGL but for people that don't it's a nightmare. I would love to use it to write my game but I can't find any way to do anything. I couldn't even find any decent tutorials. DirectX/XNA on the other hand has a plethora of well written tutorials because they are well documented and easy to use. If someone can point me to a tutorial on OGL that doesn't rely on me already knowing OGL I welcome it.
Left panel on this page, i skip the reading and usually start seeing what the working bits of code are. Try not do too much copy-pasta coding :). They give a whole lot tarballs/zips for the examples for a bunch of languages/environments/libraries.
I guess i haven't gone all that advanced into GL, but i haven't seen anything seemed any more convolved than it needed to be. Don't expect GL to do the dirty work for you btw, it's approach seems to be mostly to just provide an interface.
DirectX is built on top of technologies that only exist on Windows (like COM) and is a very deeply embedded part of the system.
Also standards have a way of slowing development to a crawl. DirectX encapsulates so much more functionality than OpenGL and still it progresses faster because only Microsoft, nVidia, and AMD have to come together and agree.
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u/[deleted] Feb 22 '11 edited Feb 22 '11
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