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freeglut is a completely OpenSourced alternative to the OpenGL Utility Toolkit (GLUT) library. GLUT was originally written by Mark Kilgard to support the sample programs in the second edition OpenGL 'RedBook'. Since then, GLUT has been used in a wide variety of practical applications because it is simple, universally available and highly portable.
GLUT (and hence freeglut) allows the user to create and manage windows containing OpenGL contexts on a wide range of platforms and also read the mouse, keyboard and joystick functions.
freeglut is released under the X-Consortium license.
The original GLUT library seems to have been abandoned with the most recent version (3.7) dating back to August 1998. It's license does not allow anyone to distribute modified the library code. This would be OK, if not for the fact that GLUT is getting old and really needs improvement. Also, GLUT's license is incompatible with some software distributions (eg Xfree86).
freeglut was originally written by Pawel W. Olszta with contributions from Andreas Umbach and Steve Baker. Steve is now the official owner/maintainer of freeglut.
Pawel started freeglut development on December 1st, 1999. The project is now a virtually 100% replacement for the original GLUT with only a few departures (such as the abandonment of SGI-specific features such as the Dials&Buttons box and Dynamic Video Resolution).
Check the downloads page for the latest release.
Send freeglut related questions to the appropriate freeglut mailing list:
You can subscribe to them via the SourceForge project interface.
I believe this is enough for a short introduction. If you are not tired of reading yet, check out the freeglut project log. Here you will find the yet-to-be-introduced new project structure description. Finally, here you will find the latest work progress report. Since freeglut is a re-implementation of the original GLUT API, you can find API documentation at http://www.opengl.org.