AMD Throws Down Its Open-Source Gauntlet

This past week yielded up one of the best pieces of news in a long time for Linux users: AMD has pledged to offer open-source video drivers for some of its ATI graphics chips. It gets better: The company's not just writing the code for the drivers and offering it openly, but releasing full documentation for its video systems so that anyone can do the same thing.

This is hugely good news. For a long time, one of the biggest thorns in Linux's side was a lack of open drivers for high-end video hardware from mutual rivals AMD and Nvidia. They offered proprietary binary drivers for their cards, but no source code -- possibly because each was terrified the other would somehow reverse-engineer super secret stuff about their hardware and use it to gain an edge. Frankly, the real "edge" to be gained here is the support of a small but growing (and extremely vocal and influential) user base, and in my book there's no "edge" better than positive word-of-mouth and good karma.

And so AMD has changed its tune, if not its entire songbook, and is now preparing to offer both code and documentation for current and future hardware. Intel has already done so for many of their integrated / mobile graphics controllers, which is really useful -- I can't count the number of notebooks and small form-factor desktops that have passed through my hands that used an Intel integrated video system.

There are several benefits, both immediate and long term, that I can think of. The first is better support for 2-D/3-D desktop-compositing effects (e.g., Beryl), onscreen font rendering, and so on. Then there's full 3-D support, which will benefit not just gamemakers -- who are an extremely tiny fraction of Linux's business, anyway -- but the folks who make Linux editions of 3-D graphics and media-creation software. Linux has fairly strategic importance in the 3-D graphics-creation market, simply because it's that much cheaper to outfit workstations and rendering nodes with Linux; it's one less license cost to worry about.

The biggest benefit is AMD becoming a closer partner than ever with the open-source community, and leading by example. It has thrown down a gauntlet: We're not scared of providing our hardware specs to the world, and in the end it may be better than pretending everything is a black box. Who's next?

How about it, Nvidia? Feel up to being open?