The Register has a follow-up to the release of the OpenGL 3.0 specifications earlier this week (thanks Mike Martinez), and the resulting hue and cry from folks unhappy with the limited progress in the new version of the API (story). They spoke with Neil Trevett, president of OpenGL proprietor Khronos Group and VP of member company NVIDIA, who told them his consortium hopes to start the process of streamlining OpenGL with version 3.1, saying that version 3.0 lays the groundwork for this, adding his personal hopes that the new spec will be released within six months. Here's a bit:

Trevett said the re-write was simply too much to engineer at the time. OpenGL is used in massive range of scenarios and supported by AMD, Apple, Intel, Dolby, Ericsson, Panasonic, Nokia and Symbian to name just a few of the 100 Khronos members.

Trevett reckoned that while people worked on the big goal of shrinking OpenGL the delays this produced meant companies relying on the API had been unable to take advantage of latest changes in hardware.

"Games are rebuilt every generation," Trevett said. "CAD programs can't have stuff disappear at short notice."

He added that while OpenGL 3.0 isn't as streamlined as people were hoping it would be, the deprecation mechanism is a step towards that bigger goal while giving people in CAD a chance to find out what's going to disappear ahead of time, and to prepare accordingly.