Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 1st Jun 2007 15:05 UTC, submitted by Michael
"Last year when AMD announced their acquisition of ATI it led many to wonder how this would impact the quality of their Linux support and driver. Some had even speculated that AMD would be opening the code to at least a subset of their graphics drivers, and while this issue has come up again more recently, we will cover this particular topic in a different article. In this article we will be exposing what truly consists of the ATI/AMD driver development cycle and ultimately what they are really doing to improve their image in the Linux community."
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Member since:2006-11-04
As far as BSD/Solaris, it comes across as a "boned either way" type of deal. With closed source drivers (ie, the current situation), the drivers only support the OS selections the vendors want you to run (ie Linux for ATI, Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris for nVidia as far as *nix goes). With an "open source" driver like Intel's, there's no specs, no docs without an NDA, and ultimately you're just left with undocumented, incomprehensible vendor-supplied source code that does you little better than an undocumented binary (Unless you're running Linux, in which case it'll be in the kernel tree and "just work.")
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Member since:
2006-08-27
With an Open Source driver (or even the open specs), BSD and Solaris users are screwed. Not everyone wants to go the closed proprietary route, but with the next generation "free" desktops requiring proprietary drivers, we have no choice. Our choice of operating system is being mandated to us. Either use Linux with proprietary software, or still with obsolete desktops. This sucks. The Linux community has abandoned its ideals.