AMD/ATI opening specs

[Darrin Chandler]

On Thu, Sep 06, 2007 at 11:41:18AM -0700, der.hans wrote:
> >This seems promising!
> 
> Yes, and follow-up today makes it look even better.
> 
> http://www.newsforge.net/feature/119049
> 
> The licensing choices brings up some probs for *BSD, but if the specs are
> available the GPL parts can be re-implemented. They'll also give code that
> can be studied and used to test against.

The more important issue is if/how specs are released. If good (real)
specs are released, then there are enough people out there capable of
writing drivers from scratch.

If drivers are open sourced, but specs are only available through NDA,
then there are likely to be problems with maintenance. Open drivers +
NDA specs have a history of containing magic numbers and other
obfuscation.

These issues are important to Linux, *BSD, and all other open source
operating systems. I hope to see freely available specs out there.

-- 
Darrin Chandler            |  Phoenix BSD User Group  |  MetaBUG
dwchandler at stilyagin.com   |  http://phxbug.org/      |  http://metabug.org/
http://www.stilyagin.com/  |  Daemons in the Desert   |  Global BUG Federation