AMD Releases Open Source Driver For New ATI Graphics Processors

[Rahul Sundaram]

M Daniel R Magarzo wrote:

> 
> This complements the above, this is a fact:
> 
> http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/linux64/linux64-radeonhdd.html
> 
> This is another, a short history:
> 
> I emailed to ATI-AMD Support asking (claiming I'd say..) for a Linux
> driver (I do not care about "proprietary" issues here..) for the new
> generation of ATI graphics cards, this was just a few weeks ago. Just
> some minutes later someone replied saying that I would better go to ask
> for help to my Linux community. Typical, formal easy reaction as answer.
> However, we could see that the equivalent Windows driver there was
> available in its website since the beginning, that is.. the same sad
> history about Linux drivers known until now..

This is what I call organizational reflex. As a organization grows 
larger change within it tends to take time to propagate from one end to 
another and quite often have visible conflicts from both inside and 
outside making it look dysfunctional and even schizophrenic.  This is 
especially true when companies change their strategies sharply either 
because of changes in business ( Red Hat opening up Red Hat Linux into 
Fedora), acquisitions (Novell buying into Ximian and SUSE), technology 
changes (AMD's need to integrate CPU and GPU while not losing Linux 
support) or change in management (SUN leadership changes leading to a 
wealth of Free and open source software).

In all these changes, there has been a period of challenges. Another 
potential example,

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/07/dell_linux_ubuntu_red_hat_but_where/ 


Give folks sometime. They might come around .. or they will lose.

Rahul