AMD started delivering on their word of providing GPU specifications to the open-source community without a Non-Disclosure Agreement, and now with the 2007 X Developer Summit having come to a close, we asked several key members of the X.Org community on how they judge AMD's recent move.

Adobe has this morning announced the Open Screen Project. The Open Screen Project is actually open and is designed to push consistent rich Internet experiences across a plethora of devices and varying screens. Behind Adobe in this move is Intel, LG Electronics, and Motorola, to just name a few.

The Open Web Foundation (OWF), launched in July 2008 at OSCON, has announced that it has released its Open Web Foundation Agreement (OWFa) and the first ten specifications that are under this new agreement. The OWFa is akin to a open source licence for specifications, allowing companies to place specifications under a common recognised license.

AMD's Catalyst Linux driver has improved substantially over the past few years with AMD now providing same-day Linux support, a near feature parity to the Windows Catalyst driver, and first-rate performance. Playing a critical role in improving the ATI Linux support has been Matthew Tippett. However, today will be his last day serving ATI / Advanced Micro Devices.

Last week, AMD released register specifications for the RV630 and M56 parts into open source, thus allowing the OSS community to develop 2D (and theoretically 3D) drivers, given time. Current documentation for the project is available over at X.Org.

Many Linux users are after lobbying hardware manufacturers for open-source graphics drivers or specifications for complex pieces of hardware, but an effort is underway to get hardware specifications for something very simple, a remote control.

An architecture whose specifications are public. This includes officially approved standards as well as privately designed architectures whose specifications are made public by the designers. The opposite of open is closed or proprietary.

AMD has been criticized for being slow on releasing NDA-free documents to the open-source community, but they are sanitizing and clearing these documents for release in real-time and with only two people (John Bridgman and Alex Deucher) doing a majority of the work and then having this information cleared by their legal department.

Last month we reported on VIA's new open-source driver efforts that was announced at the LF Austin Summit. This new strategy involves VIA providing the open-source community with NDA-free hardware specifications, code, and other resources -- in a similar fashion to what ATI/AMD and Intel have been doing for some time now.