ATI starts to come around?

A fair number of LWN readers have wondered: why hasn't LWN posted anything about the statements by ATI at the Red Hat Summit to the effect that it would be changing its relationship with the open source community? Certainly this is a relationship which could use some reworking; ATI has been one of the most stubborn vendors in its refusal to release free drivers or the programming information needed to let us create those drivers ourselves. As a result, free support for ATI's older hardware has required reverse engineering efforts - and the current chipsets have no free support at all. So, one would think, a statement from ATI that it plans to change its approach would be a welcome change.

As it happens, the developers in charge of making graphics work on Linux systems are pretty much unanimous in their lack of enthusiasm. This is not the first time that ATI has made promising sounds, but, so far, the corresponding actions have not been forthcoming. Graphics hacker Dave Airlie is particularly unimpressed, noting that ATI has not yet bothered to communicate its intentions to the developers:

Dave is particularly annoyed because he has been sitting on the code which implements 2D support for the R500 chipset for many months while waiting for ATI to give him permission to distribute it. There is no ATI code in this driver; Dave is asking permission because he signed a non-disclosure agreement with the company. So far, that permission has not been granted. Until that changes, it's hard to believe that ATI is interested in free support for its hardware.

There is one thing which has changed: ATI is now part of AMD. Historically, AMD has been much more friendly toward the free software community. It could well be that this approach is now filtering down through ATI and could result in some real changes. But we should not celebrate too much until ATI follows its words with some concrete actions.

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to post comments

ATI starts to come around?

Posted May 17, 2007 2:22 UTC (Thu) by cventers (guest, #31465) [Link] (2 responses)

I'd like to invite readers to do what I have done in this case. I think
AMD's e-mail address format is firstname.lastname@amd.com. The gentleman
who announced AMD's intent to cooperate with free software people is Henri
Richard. So why don't we start by e-mailing him with the suggestion that
they free Dave's r500 code as an act of good will?

ATI starts to come around?

Posted May 17, 2007 8:40 UTC (Thu) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] (1 responses)

So why don't we start by e-mailing him with the suggestion that they free Dave's r500 code as an act of good will?

Seconded, and sent :)

ATI starts to come around?

Posted May 17, 2007 10:03 UTC (Thu) by alonso (guest, #2828) [Link]

Better to make a petition online, and send him the link.
I'm not native english speaking so better that someone else write it, go to
http://www.petitiononline.com/

ATI starts to come around?

Posted May 17, 2007 10:55 UTC (Thu) by dale77 (guest, #1490) [Link]

Aye, I'm waiting for a Theater 550 tuner driver... I won't hold my breath
though, and might just sell the thing and buy something else. Silly me for
buying one in the first place.

ATI starts to come around?

Posted May 17, 2007 11:58 UTC (Thu) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]

http://www.pledgebank.com/open3d -- but I guess Intel makes it there first.

ATI starts to come around?

Posted May 17, 2007 19:02 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Good discussion on Christopher Blizzard's blog: http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=288

ATI has announced carefully worded variants of, "we'll work more closely with the Linux community in the future" before. Will Henri Richard manage to produce good docs or readable source this time around? I sure hope so but I'm not holding my breath.

ATI starts to come around?

Posted May 17, 2007 20:19 UTC (Thu) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link]

I totally agree, actions speaks louder than words. Which is why I buy
laptops with Intel graphics.

ATI: Put up or shut up.