LWN.net writes: "A quick report from the kernel summit: AMD's representative at the summit has announced that the company has made a decision to enable the development of open source drivers for all of its (ATI) graphics processors from the R500 going forward. There will be specifications available and a skeleton driver as well; a free 2D driver is anticipated by the end of the year. The rest will have to be written; freeing of the existing binary-only driver is not in the cards, and 'that is better for everybody'. Things are looking good on this front. More in the kernel summit report to come."
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Hate to burst your bubble, but Intel, Dell, HP and others running Linux made it clear that AMD better get off their butts and make inroads or lose this opportunity.
Yes, and? They are some of the purists I was talking about, at least the people in those companies pushing for this. The purists aren't just individuals who are into the philosophy of Free software for moral reasons, they are also open source purists who know that the model works better in many situations. And they include some companies.
Edited 2007-09-06 13:55
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Yes, and? They are some of the purists I was talking about, at least the people in those companies pushing for this. The purists aren't just individuals who are into the philosophy of Free software for moral reasons, they are also open source purists who know that the model works better in many situations. And they include some companies.
The major OEMs pushing for this weren't listening to purists. They were just being practical. ATI's Linux drivers were a complete joke, making it infeasible to ship a laptop with Linux and an ATI graphics card.
The Linux kernel development model intentionally makes closed source drivers a pain to work with, so open source drivers make more sense from a practical standpoint.
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2006-01-17
This is pretty sweet.
And now I'll be a shit-kicking jerk: to all those "pragmatists" who used to claim we should be grateful that they are making drivers for us at all and that we should just be happy with the binary drivers, look at what being a purist can get you. If the "zealots" hadn't kept at it, insisting that ATI open up, they wouldn't have.