AMD to open up graphics specs [LWN.net]

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 16:11 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: AMD to open up graphics specs by corbet
Parent article: AMD to open up graphics specs

Even if they do follow through, it remains to be seen if the community will manage to produce a fully-fonctionnal driver out of this. Last time ATI played this card the result was somewhat lacking.

AMD is to be commended if this happens, but a FLOSS driver won't happen overnight. And its silicon is said to be a lot less nice to play with than NVidia's.

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AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 22:17 UTC (Wed) by AJWM (subscriber, #15888) [Link]

A few years back ATI did release specs, the ATI 9200/9250 series (G200?) is the highest for which they did so.

I have a 9250 card and the FLOSS drivers work pretty well for it, including 3D acceleration (such as the card is capable of).

There are already FLOSS drivers for the later cards, based largely on reverse-engineering. With the specs available they should catch up pretty quickly.

AMD to open up graphics specs

Posted Sep 5, 2007 23:49 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Sorta.

They released it under NDA and only to certain people.

Same thing with Intel. From what I remember Intel originally farmed out development to Tungsten Graphics and then brought them into the fold.

Intel's graphics are definately open source, but they aren't as open as they should be. I bought lots of Intel hardware because of this and I've recommended it to other people.

Intel did a good thing releasing source code, but like most things everybody does, it can get better.

(to the other people: )
THIS IS GOOD NEWS!!

Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, this is the BEST thing you could hope to get!

The ATI proprietary drivers are going to be a minefield of nasty NDA agreements, cross licensing and all sorts of other stuff. Companies involved in those drivers are going to be numbered in the dozens. SGI, Microsoft, Nvidia, S3, etc etc. Some of them are very anti-open source, very pro-patents in their legal stances. Some of them have sold their patents and copyright assists to other companies, the legality of everything is going to be very uncertain.

In other words: The drivers are not AMD's to give away. Realise that the legal/political issues revolving around closed source can screw over developers as much as end users. (Free software is about liberating both the user and the developer.)

So in order to give away the source code to the drivers AMD needs to make new drivers. If they are going to open source it, then why not get 3rd party developers involved from the start?

Makes sense to me!!!

Ra-ra-ra Open source is starting to win in the 3D graphics arena.