One of the big announcements at this years SIGGRAPH was the release of the OpenGL 3.0 specification. OpenGL is the definitive open-standard Application Interface for graphics in the computing industry, and is supported on hardware platforms ranging from the cellphone sector to the high end gaming console.

Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony observed that "some distributions have come out, claiming to be taking the 'moral high ground' by refusing to give in to 'Microsoft threats,' while openly promoting the means of circumventing proprietary software on their web sites, amounting to nothing more than high-brow software piracy

Slashdot founder Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda recently announced a new Slashdot section dedicated to offtopic humor, memes, viral videos, and pictures. --It's at Idle.slashdot.org. He said it's been beta tested for the last few months but I've only heard about it today.

The OpenGL 4.1 specification has been defined by the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) working group at Khronos, and includes the GLSL 4.10 update to the OpenGL Shading language and is accompanied by a number of extensions introducing cutting-edge functionality to the OpenGL standard.

2007 was probably The Year Of Free Graphics: AMD/ATI’s specs, a new totally Mesa , output hotplugging via XRandR and the announcement of new shiny OpenGL specs. While this all was truly great, the OpenGL releases never happened, and there are no updates on the topic.

The Khronos Group today released the final WebGL 1.0 specification to enable hardware-accelerated 3D graphics in HTML5 Web browsers without the need for plug-ins. WebGL defines a JavaScript binding to OpenGL ES 2.0 to allow rich 3D graphics within a browser on any platform supporting the industry-standard OpenGL or OpenGL ES graphics APIs.

The NVIDIA 180.44 Linux driver officially adds support for several new graphics processors, fixes various OpenGL crashes (including the KDE 4.x Plasma problems), adds support for OpenGL 3.0 floating-point depth buffers, and brings a number of VDPAU fixes.

Woah, here comes a pleasant surprise from AMD with their Catalyst Linux driver. AMD today delivered a new preview driver that's based on Catalyst 10.3 and it brings OpenGL 3.3/4.0 support!

Slashdot's front page contains slightly aggressive and grossly inaccurate GPL and open source FUD. An observation and rebuttal to it you can find here. (thanks for the headsup, Tracy).