ATI Made Opensource ! ! !

"It's been a rumour for several weeks, but now it's confirmed: AMD buys ATI. What implications is this merger going to have for the hardware market?"

AMD will be providing NDA specifications, an open-source library, and there is a new open-source graphics driver as a result. AMD will continue producing a closed-source proprietary driver; however, they are opening the source-code to a critical library with accompanying GPU specifications for X.Org developers.

From the article: "A baseline driver should be available next week and there is already a community of developers in hand with AMD's GPG documentation. The driver that will be made available is comparable to the Avivo driver, but it should be excelling at a much faster rate." That will be an open-source driver for the R500 and R600 GPUs! As mentioned in the article, AMD is paying Novell to do some of the work.

Intel open source, Ati then Nvidia is on the way.