On Sunday 25 July 2010 10:29:02 pm fiers...@zonnet.nl wrote: > Op 26-07-10 07:14, fiers...@zonnet.nl schreef: > > Op 25-07-10 19:19, Stefan Seifert schreef: > >> On the other hand, I'm running a system with 100% free software thanks > >> to AMD's releasing of documentation for driver writers for ATI cards. > >> And my ATI card with its free drivers allowed me for the first time in > >> many years not only to run FlightGear but also good video performance, > >> desktop effects in KDE and usable performance with anti aliased fonts > >> which is something NVidia never managed to do for me (some known > >> problems with their drivers which never got fixed). > >> > >> Times change. > > > > True. But remember how many years it took for AMD to come to this > > insight... > > AIT not AMD. Sorry. It took ATI many years, and being purchased by AMD, > probably. >
It took about 6 months from the merger date for AMD to change these policies (IE. support open source...) and it was only another month or two before we started see the release of hardware documentation. In large mergers like this is takes about 6 months to a year for things to start settling and for long term directions to be set. AMD did this about as fast as can be expected after the merger and it is clear to me based on my own experience working at companies that had mergers that they intended to do this right from the beginning otherwise it would have taken longer. ATI was a bad actor but they are under new management and that new management has changed directions. AMD is clearly doing the right things here and we should give them credit and encouragement for their efforts. I don't think that ATI would have made this change if the AMD merger had not happened at least not any time soon. As a side note I have read that internally AMD credits much of their success with the Athon 64/Opteron to the open source community. After all it was only months after the hardware was released that users started running Athlon 64 based open source systems and it was fairly clear that the adoption of this hardware in the open source community was much more pervasive than in the Windows world at least in the first few years. Additionally AMD (like Intel I might add) is active in open source efforts and has teams that work on things like GCC and the Linux kernel among other things. AMD and Intel sell hardware and the open source community is a fairly significant segment of that market. Both companies are trying to support that market segment and it benefits all of us that they do. I wish their attitude were more pervasive among other hardware companies. Hal ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Palm PDK Hot Apps Program offers developers who use the Plug-In Development Kit to bring their C/C++ apps to Palm for a share of $1 Million in cash or HP Products. Visit us here for more details: http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;226879339;13503038;l? http://clk.atdmt.com/CRS/go/247765532/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
