Thursday, September 06, 2007

ATI/AMD opening up their Graphics drivers

As reported here ATI/AMD is opening up their Linux video drivers. I am really excited about this. This is a great development. There are some areas of the software/hardware are that Open Source makes more sense for than others, and video drivers are one of those areas. Graphics/gaming freaks are notorious for their passion for getting the most out of their hardware. Doing minute little things for just a little more performance. As a hardware manufacturer that opens up their drivers, ATI/AMD is harnessing that power. Technically savy users can now update, change, fix, improve the drivers. Then contribute that hard work to the comunity and everyone benefits from a more stable, faster driver, and ATI doesn't have to spend a penny for it. Very exciting. Intel has been doing this for a while and I hope that this pushes Nvidia to move this way too. Lately their closed source drivers for linux have been of much higher quality than ATI's, but they don't have any open source drivers. Maybe they can support Nouveau, the group that is trying to build completely open source drivers for Nvidia's cards. Woohoo.

First, graphics drivers, then the world.