Opensource ATI drivers

[adamk]

Looks like it's official:

http://lwn.net/Articles/248227/

2D specs in the next week or two and 3D specs to follow afterwards according Dave Airlie (who has actually talked to the folks involved).

Adam

[lurkinator]

Here's as close to the lowdown as we're likely to get before AMD makes an official announcement: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=826&num=1

I suspect some people will be unimpressed with the NDA aspect, and I'm not too impressed about mention of the "bells and whistles" being available only in the closed driver (though perhaps this just refers to software bits that make things simpler for non-techies, not hardware features), but I for one am impressed.

OOXML gets voted down (at least until next Spring), ATI opens up (a lot of)their hardware specs, Dell, HP and Lenovo (oh and Shuttle) all offering Linux pre-installs, maybe there's hope for society after all! :P

I think it goes without saying that if this effort bears fruit beyond PR (and it looks to have already) my next video card, and the video cards of those whose computer buying choices I may influence in future will be from AMD.

I wonder if AMD would do something similar for their motherboard chipsets eventually now?

edit: another link with some more details from AMD
http://www.linux.com/feature/119049

[Suzuran]

I hope this has some effect on those of us using slightly older cards too. I'd be especially impressed if all the multimedia capabilities would finally work.

[Forlong]

Looks like things are finally getting off the ground.

A developer of the open radeon driver got employed by AMD to work on "open source driver development and working with the open source community to support AMD products"

http://www.botchco.com/agd5f/?p=6