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!

AMD announced on Sept 7 a major strategic change in open-source graphic processors support. It announced it would provide open-source information and a development package supporting the ATI RadeonHD 2000 series ATI Radeon X1000 series of graphics processing units on Linux desktops.

Currently, GNU/Linux users with Nvidia graphics cards have two choices: Either use the proprietary drivers and violate their free software principles, or use the free nv driver and do without 3-D acceleration. The Nouveau project is working to overcome this dilemma by producing its own set of fully functional free Nvidia drivers.

I can’t possibly profess to know what the pros and cons are of pushing hardware device drivers into the hypervisors that support virtualization technologies like those from XEN and VMware.

Dell knows it won't happen overnight, but along side wanting to ship audio/video codecs, Intel Wireless 80.211N support for Linux, Broadcom Wireless for Linux, and being able to ship notebooks and desktops with Compiz Fusion enabled, Dell would like to see improved ATI Linux drivers.

Jerome Glisse announced today that a small team of X.Org developers has managed to provide the initial support for ATI R500-based cards (ATI Radeon X1300 up to X1600 at the time) by reverse engineering. The released code is definitely not yet ready for the normal users, but it's the big step ahead nevertheless.

In this article we will be exposing what truly consists of the ATI/AMD driver development cycle and ultimately what they are really doing to improve their image in the Linux community. We have been granted unprecedented access to share with you their once unknown driver development model.