OpenGL 3.1

It's a real man's OpenGL. No cruft. No fluff. Just you and the shader units, locked in a battle for supremacy. People who can't write their own perspective projection matrices should just pick up their toys and go home.
John "Zed" Carmack wouldn't have wanted to be mollycoddled by DirectX and the likes, and neither should you.

ARB_compatibility - you just sure got told. Also, what's with the development slowness? MS goes much faster and has been eating the marketshare at the speed of light.

AFAICT Direct3D itself is not "patented"/protected in the sense that it's just an API, maybe the others should just copy it. Heck, if you use the same driver ABI, the drivers are already written.

Problem solved.

(Of course OSS fanatics will never allow this since "M$ would have won" - enjoy your 1% marketshare)

>>2
WoW + Quake * + Unreal * = 1% marketshare

>>3
I don't know what the fuck are you talking about, but WoW and Unreal default to Direct3D whenever possible.

>>2
Don't use ARB_compatibility, obviously. MS was going faster while they were playing catch-up and the OpenGL guys were docile, but any feature lead they've gained should prove temporary now that OpenGL development has picked up again.
No one is going to adopt the Direct3D API, because there's no advantage to it over OpenGL with a good engine, except from MS's POV. If you thought there was a feature lag now, imagine if everybody had to wait until MS did a release, and then start reverse engineering the new API.