Confirmatin that ATI is planning on opening its drivers?

[NoTiG]

I was reading this article here and read this: http://enterprise.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/10/11/1355201


He also says that "we have confirmation" that ATI is moving towards opening up its capabilities for video drivers since the company's acquisition by AMD.

John Cherry, DTL initiative manager

[maniacmusician]

what the hell does "opening up its capabilities" mean? it doesnt really sound like going open source...but if it is, i'll be happy...i've been struggling with driver problems for a while now.

[NoTiG]

Here is the whole sentence:
As for open driver support, Cherry says that things have gotten better in the last year, particularly with improved support for wireless devices and better support for video cards. He also says that "we have confirmation" that ATI is moving towards opening up its capabilities for video drivers since the company's acquisition by AMD.

I think it might actually be a necessary step to eventually open them up..... if after all the GPU will become integrated with the CPU.

One thing i liked about having non-integrated components was that I could upgrade them.... but i usually upgrade my video card and CPU at the same time anyway so i guess its no big deal.

[chaosgeisterchen]

ATI does not have to support Linux as it has a real small market share - so it would be nice but they are not pressed to open up towards *nix, I assume. That would only open their 'secrets' even to competitors like nVidia.

[prizrak]

I would very much like to see their "confirmation" before making any judgement. Don't get too excited about it though, even if they release an open driver it is highly unlikely that the 3D part will be released. They will most likely just release the basic 2D specs just to make sure that their cards work out of the box with distro's that don't include anything proprietary.