AMD's John Bridgman has confirmed that they are in the process of hiring new people to do all of the planned documentation and support work that will help the open-source community. Within a couple weeks, these new AMD employees will begin this crusade.

Detailed and proper documentation of source code and programs is the milestone of Unix culture, as we may read in “The art of Unix Programming” by Eric Steven Raymond. The first application on Unix was the platform to prepare documents. The platform was used by Bell Labs to prepare patent documents.

We the GNU/Linux community and the undersigned, kindly request that you, NVIDIA Corporation, increase your efforts in better enabling the open-source community to develop free software drivers for your graphics hardware. Your major competitors in this market, AMD/ATI and Intel, have not only supported the community in open-source driver development efforts but they are now openly releasing hardware programming documentation.

AMD has today launched their new open GPU documentation website for register-level documents covering their ATI Radeon products. In addition, they are now providing an email address for any open-source developers who may have questions concerning these documents.

The problem with Alex Browns validation test is, that he is using a document from OpenOffice.org 2.4 and validates it against the ISO-approved standard. Jesper Lund Stocholm claims that he has created some documents with various versions of OpenOffice.org that doens't validates correctly.

Last month Alex Deucher pushed out the xf86-video-ati 6.7.195 driver, which is another release candidate before the 6.8 release for this open-source ATI graphics driver.

The Agency for the Development of Government Electronic Management and Information and Knowledge Society of Uruguay have now published their recommendation that public documents use either ODF or PDF. The former should be used for documents in the process of being edited and the latter for documents in final form. (To see a discussion of these document uses, see my May, 2006, blog entry.)

This morning at the X Developer Summit in the United Kingdom, Matthew Tippett and John Bridgman of AMD have announced that they will be releasing their ATI GPU specifications without any Non-Disclosure Agreements needed by the developers!

I use a ton of software applications, but a major portion of the time I spend using a computer goes to writing, and creating documents. There are many good open source tools for everything from word processing, to desktop publishing, to booklet creation, to weaving words and graphics together.