"AMD will soon deliver open graphics drivers"

[gfxdrone]

I won't believe this until I see an official announcement from AMD (not from ATI). An announcement made by someone other than a marketing guy. And that looks like this:

AMD is pleased to announce that the driver code for all its cards will be released under open source license x. We look forward to working directly with the xorg and kernel teams, and hope to get our drivers into the kernel and xorg as soon as possible.

I do however believe that AMD may do this, because when you consider very large rollouts in offices etc, those types of systems will almost never use standalone gfx cards, and with AMD's plans to more deeply integrate graphics into multicore cpus, along with standard cards or mobo gfx chips, the only real choice is to open the specs, and hopefully the drivers, especially if AMD plans on competing with Intel for real long term.

[Svartalf]

My comments will come later . And yes, AMD's statements are real.

I'll bet that's rubbing the old-guard in the ATI division the wrong way... >:-)

In all honesty, I want to see this be that they're releasing sufficient register specs- code would be okay, but letting us know how to drive it from Mesa/DRI would be better.

I guess we'll see what they're going to do in short term, eh?

[halfmanhalfamazing]

Also I'm a bit confused by "open graphics drivers". Why produce all the hype by mentioning "open", without the "-source"?

I really hope they do publish the entire graphics driver, instead of just opening parts, that aren't full IP that AMD wants to keep a secret.

Personally, I think this is better. We shouldn't be asking for open source drivers anyways. Just ask for the full specs. There's too many issues involved with these companies opening up their drivers, we might as well not even ask at all.

But asking for specs, we've got a shot. Hopefully the specs will be forthcoming. I've got hope seeing as they *DIDN'T* use the terms you mentioned.

[marcheu]

Dave Airlie has got it right I think :
http://airlied.livejournal.com/43520.html