History
Sam Lantinga created the library, first releasing it in early 1998, while working for Loki Software. He got the idea while porting a Windows application to Macintosh. He then used SDL to port Doom to BeOS (see Doom source ports). Several other free libraries were developed to work alongside SDL, such as SMPEG and OpenAL. He also founded Galaxy Gameworks in 2008 to help commercially support SDL, although the company plans are currently on hold due to time constraints.
SDL 1.3 is a major update to the SDL 1.2 codebase. It replaces several parts of the 1.2 API with more general support for multiple input and output options. Some feature additions include multiple window support, multiple input device support (many mice, many keyboards, etc.), hardware-accelerated 2D graphics, and better Unicode support. You can look at the roadmap to get a sense of what needs to be done for the move to SDL 1.3/2.0. SDL 1.3, when finished, will eventually become SDL 2.0. SDL 1.3 is zlib-licensed, and therefore freely available for static linking in commercial closed-source projects, unlike SDL 1.2. The same day Sam Lantinga announced that he will be joining Valve Software, he also announced that "it's time to unleash SDL 2.0 on the masses".
Read more about this topic: Simple DirectMedia Layer
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