First of all, you should understand that OpenGL is not a library, but an API specification. Libraries can implement this API. But usually OpenGL is implemented by the GPU device driver.
opengl32.dll ships as part of Windows. All versions of Windows with WindowsNT-4 and Windows95-B ship with opengl32.dll as part of the basic installation. It acts as a channel for programs that use OpenGL to talk to GPU drivers that actually implement it. OpenGL magic is not found in opengl32.dll , but in GPU drivers! There is a mechanism called OpenGL ICD , which GPU drivers use to intercept their OpenGL materials in a DLL.
Is there an open source version of OpenGL for MS Windows?
Well, yes, Mesa3D can also be created for Windows, but as a result, the DLL will not be able to talk to the GPU drivers, but simply implement all the OpenGL functions using the software visualization tool. On Linux, Mesa3D also implements device drivers for a number of GPUs, but these drivers require Linux-specific kernel interfaces and are not portable (however, other open source operating systems, such as FreeBSD, used the Linux Mesa3D kernel APIs , so it works there as well).
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