Quote Originally Posted by bridgman View Post
Yes, but your implication seemed to be that the use of the word "Open" in the standard name meant that it should at least have an open/free implementation -- or maybe I got that wrong.
No, you actually got it right. There absolutely should be an official open/free implementation of it. My comment was just there to point out that people had been talking about free software before 1998, there is no reason such a free implementation should have been off the table at the time.

Quote Originally Posted by ShadowBane View Post
You have that much need for a terribly preforming softpipe that has the sole goal of being a reference implementation? Honestly, a reference driver can't be made, because graphics cards are not uniform.
If I got it right, Mesa is a generic implementation of OpenGL (Wikipedia). What I'm saying is that maybe the entity behind OpenGL should have had been doing something similar to Mesa from the beginning as a reference implementation...