Thursday, September 6, 2007

AMD's New Open Source Strategy

In a press statement AMD announced better support for Linux in the future, and "also plans to accelerate efforts to address the needs of the open source community as well". The question is just, what are those efforts? At LWN a declaration to this statement is made, and announces AMD reported at the Kernel Summit, that they will open the graphic specs for their graphic processors from the R500 forward.

Well, if this is true then it's really good news, and just another great move toward full 3D for Linux.

Edit: The speculations about AMD's strategy about their obscure open source effort is finished, and gave a detailed statement, but in short: "AMD will be providing NDA specifications, an open-source library, and there is a new open-source graphics driver as a result."

2 comments:

qubodup said...

I just looked at the wiki... don't you think a decent license would make sense? (gfdl)

Michael said...

I chose the FreeBSD Documentation license for the wiki (at least temporary), because I really think it's suits better than the GNU FDL. Principally I'd like to use a copyleft license to guarantee knowledge will remain open, but GFDL is too restrictive in many ways! I also thought about a Creative Commons license, but the incompatibility between GNU really sucks. For now I chose BSD-like licenses for simplicity, flexibility, and freedom.

If you like to know more details about this subject and my thought, consider to read the following topic in the forums, please: http://unixgamedev.tuxfamily.org/board/index.php?topic=7.0

Thanks anyway for your feedback, 'cause it's not easy to make a reasonably longterm decision for any Unix & FOSS game development purpose.