The Letter That Started AMD's Open-Source Strategy 92
An anonymous reader writes "In marking the fourth anniversary of AMD's open-source strategy for their Radeon graphics, Phoronix has published the letter that launched this open-source effort. It was a letter written by Novell SUSE X engineers and submitted to AMD management with their open-source proposal."
Re:Lol open sores (Score:4, Insightful)
The OSS driver works pretty good for antique hardware. Unfortunately, it doesn't work very well for anything vaguely modern, while fglrx pretty much doesn't support anything more than a few years old (and it does more or less suck.) Consequently, if you have anything but the fanciest (unless it's very very new) or shabbiest ATI card, you can expect it to suck rocks through straws on Linux. nVidia is better but shares many of the same flaws. However, middle-aged hardware is well-supported by the official driver, and amazingly old hardware is supported as well. That makes support much easier, and while shopping for older computers with Linux compatibility in mind, it makes avoiding ATI a no-brainer as well. This reduction in resale value causes me to value ATI less up front... But to the masses who will never run Linux on a desktop, it's fairly irrelevant. Most people don't buy used hardware.
Anyone want to buy a P4 desktop with an ATI Rage Pro in it? It runs Ubuntu just fine :)
Re:Firts 4 comments read like trolls (Score:4, Insightful)
The difference there is that Intel doesn't have any IP in this area worth protecting.
Also, what you're conveniently ignoring is that most of the source that AMD has came from ATI and was prior to the change in strategy. It's not easy to go back and retroactively open source things for which you may or may not already have the rights. I'm guessing that there's probably a fair amount of other people's IP involved. And even if there isn't, the legal team does still need to go through and make sure that they aren't going to be sued for releaseing something they shouldn't.