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Forget F/OSS drivers or specsForget F/OSS drivers or specsPosted Jul 25, 2006 21:26 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333)In reply to: Forget F/OSS drivers or specs by jmorris42 Parent article: What AMD's ATI acquisition means for Linux (and Macs) (Linux-Watch)
This guy seems to have some insights:
His conjecture is that the ATI and AMD merger will remove the 'cut throat' style compitition between Nvidia and ATI.
This sort of 'cut throat' activity leads to a lot of buggy hardware and paranoid execuatives (which directly lead to closing off and going ultra-propriatory).
Now AMD that controls ATI Nvidia will have to work very close with it's previously biggest competitor. Whatever they do will have to be mutually benificial. If AMD and Nvidia fights then it will mean certain doom for Nvidia and AMD will loose a valuable business partner that helps make them lots and lots of money in the server and desktop markets.
So if anything it should foster more openness and cooperation.
Also the idea of integrating GPU technology directly into the silicon shared with the CPU is interesting. If that happens I don't see ANY point in keeping 3d acceleration programming interfaces a secret. How is requiring binary-only drivers for your CPU going to work out? I don't see how it does and Linux is valuable to AMD also. This is aiming for 2008 for this technology AMD or at least it seems that way.
However I still don't see AMD automaticly openning up documentation for ATI video cards. There is a lot of tech in those cards that ATI doesn't own. For instance somebody stated above that macromedia protection BS. Also with OpenGL there are a decent number of software patents you have to deal with. In order to support open source drivers you would have to forgo some binary compatability and loose a certain amount of performance with games and applications that were previously programmed to use the propriatory drivers.
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