Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 16th Nov 2007 19:49 UTC, submitted by Michael Larabel
"The leading question most of you are likely wondering is why there hasn't been anymore ATI GPU specifications released in over two months. Well, as we have shared in earlier articles, AMD has had limited staff devoted to sanitizing the documentation and getting it cleared by their legal department for release. However, that is about to change. AMD's John Bridgman has confirmed that they are in the process of hiring new people to do all of the planned documentation and support work that will help the open-source community. Within a couple weeks, these new AMD employees will begin this crusade."
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Member since:
2005-07-06
I'd love to see nVidia open too; and go a step further, dedicate a large number of programmers to writing a clean opensource driver which works with the opensource community.
The great thing; this will also improve things in the operating system world - imagine being able to go and upgrade your Mac's graphics card without needing to wait for a "Mac version" - if the specifications are open, someone also has the ability to hopefully write an EFI firmware so that its just a flash away.
All operating systems will benefit, both open and closed source; Microsoft will have all the specifications in their hands, all operating systems will be able to operate on a level playing field when it comes to hardware compatibility.
What I would love to see is this go beyond graphics cards, I want to see all hardware open; Realtek provides specifications for their hardware to those who ask - maybe its time for OEM's to step up and demand that hardware companies open up their specifications fully or lose their OEM contract. This will not only help operating system vendors but also help OEM vendors by virtue of the operating system vendors being able to properly support hardware and thus reduce the technical support calls.