AMD/ATI to Open Source Video Drivers

Source: From Christopher Blizzard's Blog: Invisible Sandwich

AMD, ATI's parent company, has been promising better video driver support for the Linux community for the past year. While driver updates have been monthly and the ATI's fglx driver has gotten much better, development still has been slow, closed and proprietary. AMD has now decided to open source their drivers and has promised the these two things:

• To develop of a fully functional 2D and 3D driver that supports all of their newer radeon chipsets. This will be done in full collaboration with the open source community and will have the direct participation of hackers from companies like Red Hat and Novell.

• To release documentation that anyone can use to build and support drivers for their chips.

This means that not only will Red Hat & Novell hackers be able to work on the driver, but anybody will be able to contribute to the code. Once the drivers do go open source, we should see vast improvements quickly.

edited by pHreaksYcle