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AMD Releases Open-Source R600/700 3D Code
Michael writes "AMD has just released code that will allow for open-source 3D acceleration on their ATI R600 and R700 graphics cards, including all of their newest Radeon HD 4xxx products. This code consists of a demo program that feeds the commands to the hardware, updates to their RadeonHD driver, and a Direct Rendering Manager update. With this code comes working 2D EXA acceleration support for these newer ATI graphics processors as well as basic X-Video support. AMD will be releasing sanitized documentation for these new ATI GPUs in the coming weeks. Phoronix has an article detailing what's all encompassed by today's code drop as well as the activities that led to this open-source code coming about for release."
At last, the deghettoization of Linux computers with ATI chips!
If you aren't angry, you aren't paying attention.
Don't forget to pay your $699 licensing fee, you cock-smoking teabaggers!
Its about time ATI gets serious about OSS!
Or you know, it could be doing what they've been planning to do for several months now.
Or just good economical sense.
"Hey Bob, these kids on the Internet want to write Linux drivers for our cards."
"Oh really? Have we had any customer requests for Linux drivers lately?"
"Yeah, a couple."
"Send 'em that dev code we did last week, see what they come up with."
"Ok."
Shocking!
How we know is more important than what we know.
I had almost forgotten to pay my $699 licensing fee. Makes me feel like such a cock-smoking teabagger!
This seems to confirm what people have been predicting all along, that OSS philosophy is driving competition between vendors to cater to their customers' needs. Nvidia, Intel, and now ATI all providing increasing levels of documentation and code support in competitive volleys. I for one welcome our new 3d accelerated overlords.
-*The above statement is printed entirely on recycled electrons*-
AMD doing nice shit just makes it all the more heartbreaking when Intel releases better chips. I hope they get their shit together soon, I feel dirty with a Core 2 Duo.
Or it could be a new direction spurred on by new bosses (read: AMD).
The scenario you describe has one issue: last week's dev code is copyrighted by the company, not the developers. They probably needed to have some long conversations with the lawyers and accountants to get this done.
accountants? I don't think they do what you think they do.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Every single 3D accelerator I have ever owned has been an NVidia, up until now. Not because I am an NVidia fan-boy, but because that's what I started with (TNT!) and (since I switched over to Linux) because NVidia has always been the best choice for Linux support. I have never considered ATI since their Linux drivers have been craptastic. But in between what I've heard of ATI drivers having improved lately, and now with these drivers being open source, I will definitely be giving ATI a look when I build my next PC in a few months. Thanks ATI!
I chose ATI over Nvidia in my most recent graphics card purchase because of ATI's policy.
Thanks ATI; it's the right thing, and it will help your revenue.
I am looking forward to see what this means for Linux, OpenCL and other GP-GPU goodies. With OpenCL working along side OpenGL, a tightly integrated kernel ATI driver that handles the GP-GPU/OpenCL stuff we will really see some interesting stuff come our way. To my understanding OpenCL allows someone who is writing an algorithm to implement it in OpenCL and let OpenCL take care of diving up the work load between GPU's and CPU cores. Damn I am really excited to see the OSS community tie all this stuff together and release the computing power of the GPU to more general yet compute intense applications.
A system with a quad core CPU and four ATI cards would be a force to be reckoned with! Fast trans-coding/cracking of Blu-ray, rapid key sniffing for air crack, even networked applications could be sped up like IPsec and SSH. We could have fast rendering in blender and ray tracing can be done with high precision as well as speed (maybe even real time!). Gimp plug-ins can be given a boost in speed and video editing a breeze. Even a laptop with a slower dual core could benefit from its on board GPU's number crunching power. Useful for cracking WEP/WPA keys.
And AMD/ATI arent the only ones getting on board the OpenCL bandwagon, Apple developed it, and Intel along with Nvidia are also going to support it. So OpenCL will allow us to run our apps on the hardware of our choice.
What you say is correct. This is why they have been having a series of conversations with lawyers and accountants. This plan has been in the works for some time now.
Now we need some to make mac os x drivers for the 3xxx and 4xxx cards that work with all 3xxx and 4xxx cards and ones with bios roms.
I think they know how to write off such a contribution as charity.
I think you should put down the crack pipe.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Finally! Congratulations, AMD, I always preferred your CPUs and GPUs due to their sane price/performance ratio and great features, but now I think you won me for life. I hope that more and more vendors will follow AMD's steps and start releasing code and documentation.
...about my decision to buy an ATI card. I did buy it because of their willingness to release documentation hoping that I would be able use an open-source driver one day, but so far the radeonhd driver still lacks decent 2D performance and Xvideo. So I kind of got stuck with the binary driver after all, which was not always without issues.
There are people that believe the "Gates Foundation" is more of a marketing move than a moral standpoint. When you give that much money under the name of a company founder, you don't need advertisement... Viral marketing kicks in and it's spread by word of mouth. They can spend money on things they want to do and get free advertisement "credit" for the company.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
And by buy, I mean spend hard currency. I believe that is the language most business speak.
This is fantastic news, I applaude the ATI management for realizing this is a good thing to do. I stopped buying ATI in about 2000 because of the issues in getting driver support for Linux. Now that ATI is stepping up to the plate, I am adding ATI products that use this driver to my buy list!
Based on what's been on IRC in the past few hours.
Q: Wait, what?
A: Code for radeonhd and the kernel providing acceleration for Radeon HD 2400 and newer. Kernel parts are already pretty much integrated; radeonhd is integrated as well, although stuff still needs to be copied to radeon.
Q: So what does this mean for the user?
A: EXA means faster GUI responsiveness. Xv means fast video. Kernel DRM is the basis for all acceleration unification (OpenGL, etc.)
Q: Speaking of OpenGL...
A: Lawl, no. Not for another few months. Most of the code we're gonna write will target Gallium, so--
Q: Gallium?
A: Gallium is the next generation of GPU acceleration. Once we get drivers ready, it'll be awesome. Linky to TG: http://www.tungstengraphics.com/wiki/index.php/Gallium3D
Q: So this is just docs and some basic code?
A: Nope, no docs. AMD couldn't agree on docs before their vacation time, so I guess we'll see those in a month or so. On the other hand, we've got enough here to do a lot of stuff. It'd be nice if we had more devs, though. :3
Q: So why is there only code for radeonhd? Will radeon support this too? Why two separate drivers?
A: The reason for two separate drivers is a very long and largely silly story. I don't feel like repeating it, and I probably couldn't tell it fairly anyway.
I'll get radeonhd code ported over to radeon once my vacation's over, assuming nobody does it sooner. I can't do the HDMI audio setup without testing hardware, though; does anybody want to donate an HDMI audio-enabled monitor? :3
~ C.
~ C.
Why can't it be both? I'd say the Gates Foundation has been far more successful at promoting Microsoft than some of their more direct efforts.
We all joke about his billions of dollars, but to see them put to use attempting to vaccinate an entire continent, I gotta tell ya that is a pretty damned impressive thing to do.
Don't get me wrong, donations of time and money to Open Source projects are also good and noble things, and they provide infinitely-copyable and long-lasting amounts of good. But if someone asked me "who did more good, the guy who saved x-hundred-thousand kids or the guy who donated an improved scheduler algorithm to the Linux core?" there's only one way a human being could answer that question. There is a different question in there, and that is "who donated more overall effort?" Gates' money made him rich enough that he may not even feel the pinch of spending $37 billion, but the coder likely sweated over his efforts for months, sacrificing evenings and dinners with his S.O., etc. And I suspect its part of the job of the foundation to ensure the first form of the question is asked on camera, and not the second.
John
Desperate people are always the most dangerous.
Why does it have to be either?
AMD has some great cards out right now, especially in the mid and low range markets. They're not desperate by any means.
Why can't this simply be a good business decision? Hasn't the populace of Slashdot been asking for open source graphics card code for a long time?
Actually, i heard about a rider that would have allowed open source development work to be tax deductible. If that went through an accountant might be key to getting management to say yes.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
It's been about 8 years since I last immersed myself in the world of video cards and of course everything has changed since then. (Except that nVidia and AMD (was: ATI) are still on top.) Since then, whenever I've needed a video card, I've just gone to newegg and bought whichever nVidia card was priced around $50.
But pretend for a moment that I want to congratulate AMD on their open source stance and buy one of their cards. I don't need eye-blistering speed, but I want something that's going to be able to acceptably play a game released a year to six months ago. And obviously it has to work well on Linux. Would be nice if it was under $100 and dual-head, but I'll take any suggestions I can get. Is there such a card? If so, which drivers does it use?
There are people that believe the "Gates Foundation" is more of a marketing move than a moral standpoint. When you give that much money under the name of a company founder, you don't need advertisement... Viral marketing kicks in and it's spread by word of mouth. They can spend money on things they want to do and get free advertisement "credit" for the company.
It's not a marketing move, and it's not a moral standpoint. People are denied access to drugs that are cheap to manufacture because they are encumbered with intellectual property. Nations were prepared to do away with intellectual property law and supply their population with the medicine they needed. That's why Gates is doing this. He doesn't give them money because he wants to help them, he gives them money because he wants to maintain the laws that prevent them from helping themselves, because his fortune depends on the exploitation of people using those laws as a mechanism. If the Gates foundation did not exist, more people would have medicine.
This sort of behavior would be totally illegal if it wasn't disguised as charitable work. That's what the Gates foundation is for, to allow them to circumvent laws, manipulate and subvert government programs and engage in even more anti-social behavior than they are already known for.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
This has been coming for a year now, and was the reason I chose an ATI chipset when I bought my laptop. So yes, it does make economical sense.
And also, I think most of the developers work for AMD.
I've always liked AMD ever since I started building computers. I'm not really a fan boy I guess I'm just their target consumer. I prefer a low cost processor that I can squeeze every dollar worth out of than an expensive one that is really fast but will be worth one hundred or two hundred less in a year when Intel pushes out their next bleeding fast processors. I've always bought Nvidia though I just have better experience getting them to work in Linux and they seem to run games better in windows at the time as well. Well about 2 months ago I gave my friend my existing Nvidia 8800gts as a birthday gift and got myself a 4850 Raedon card. I'd been meaning to buy an ATI card ever since AMD bought them but I was apprehensive. Bringing it home though I notice a huge difference in games especially my source engine games. The only issues I've had with it was some minor flickering in Linux (thanks to compiz and the drivers) and some issues with older games which were easy to work out. I honestly don't see myself buying Nvidia after this. The fact I have CrossfireX makes the deal even sweeter. This is a slam dunk for AMD.
Hi ambiguous and extremely obvious keyword guy here. Do you ever find yourself wondering how to search for that story you saw on slashdot? Well worry no more I've gone to the liberty of tagging every single article with the keyword story so when you need to find that story on slashdot that has only articles/stories you know what to type in.
But we have been innundated with Microsoft Fanbois thus the question. Yes, I acknowledge I'm an OSS Fanboi.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
-the consumer forced it; reality: if i manufacture a netbook containing Ubuntu and everything on it is open source my software distribution and update infractructure/legal costs are: 0. In a time when hardware gets cheaper and cheaper, and support get more expensive in comparison it is a good thing to collaborate on that.
-The hard core gamers define the market. No. It's about netbooks, mobile phones and other devices. Given the exponential rise in computational power/dollar in a few years real time raytracing will take over. Bringing your own hardware interfaces/distribution infrastructure to the component market now give companies a better starting point to deliver a reliable platform. In the best case you promis the HW developer that he never has to touch the software (ok, may submit the pci id to the generic linux driver).
-Linux wins; maybe, but its more general: In the market of set-top boxes, GPS devices, mobile phones, media players etc. Widowns lost. If its linux or something else has to be seen (although the best news for linux in the recent reas was that Windriver is interested in it). Microsoft has no power to punish anybody any more.
What if this improved scheduler algorithm indirectly saved x-hundred-thousand kids?
When your company has an 80% margin and you donate stuff that costs you nothing, like "the right to use your software" and record the gift at retail price, you net a greater tax benefit than it costs you to make the gift. That's net profit for giving, which is not generous -- it's just good accounting. If, from your profits for giving stuff that costs you nothing, you also give "medicine" that's generous because it's not required. Still, if you net a profit from giving, your giving can't be considered anything more than an accounting trick because some good no matter how unlikely, might have been served by paying the tax - some tax money is spent generously or well and wisely after all.
It's not really philanthropy unless you give more than you got. This is charity. Here's my money. Give it away in the best way you can. That's also trust. They say trust is earned. Let's hope BillG deserved Warren Buffet's trust because the ill that can be done with that much gelt is serious.
Nearly all of the African continent is inflamed with horrors beyond imagining. Terror rules more of the modern world than it has for a very long time. The fate of South America is uncertain. Maybe the best use of the Gates Foundation would be to husband their resources well until such a time as they might have some hope to turn the tide. Now is not it. This groundbreaking of the $500M Gates Foundation Campus is definitely not it. You can do a lot of philanthropy for half a billion dollars.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
We all joke about his billions of dollars, but to see them put to use attempting to vaccinate an entire continent, I gotta tell ya that is a pretty damned impressive thing to do.
Yeah, but what they don't tell you is that the vaccinations create genetic mutations which cause the patient to be unquestioningly obedient to Microsoft.
... and then they built the supercollider.
A: Lawl, no.
Seriously, Lawl?
... and then they built the supercollider.
That was true --- in the past. If anything, I find that the opposite to be true these days: installing linux on a machine tends to make it just work. Installing windows, on the other hand, is a nightmare... occasionally, I find that my network card is unsupported without drivers, which is a real hassle by the time you get windows or some app to tell you what chip's involved, download drivers on some other machine and transfer them etc. Then you have printers, mice, graphics cards, etc. which are often unsupported by the standard drivers, or have limited features. Instead, they come with something that installs services, tray icons, etc., all with horrible UIs and advertising, together with scary warnings about the driver being unsigned. Granted, HP printers on Linux are just as regarding their use of using a non-standard UI, but most Linux stuff works much more nicely, with much less hassle, and bugs actually get fixed, keeping up with the rest of the OS.
We all joke about his billions of dollars, but to see them put to use attempting to vaccinate an entire continent, I gotta tell ya that is a pretty damned impressive thing to do.
Sounds good on the face of it doesn't it? But look a little closer. The entire vaccination program is about intellectual property - countries have to forgo local pharma factories that produce medicine without paying royalties - despite it being perfectly legal to do so since most of those countries do not recognize foreign patents anyway.
But if someone asked me "who did more good, the guy who saved x-hundred-thousand kids or the guy who donated an improved scheduler algorithm to the Linux core?" there's only one way a human being could answer that question.
If you are going to cherry pick the question, then of course the outcome is predetermined. But what about taking into account the source of all that money in the first place? How much of the world's GDP has microsoft skimmed off the top? Money that would have been re-invested into the domestic economies all around the world, resulting in improved economic and living conditions without having to go through all the fat-cat middlemen, each taking their cut of that money before it eventually comes back around in the form of a "charity?"
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The Gates Foundation is just another evil fund.
The foundation invests the assets that it has not yet distributed, with the exclusive goal of maximizing the return on investment. As a result, its investments include companies that have been criticized for worsening poverty in the same developing countries where the Foundation is attempting to relieve poverty. These include companies that pollute heavily and pharmaceutical companies that do not sell into the developing world.
Read e.g. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gatesx07jan07,0,6827615.story?coll=la-home-headlines
I did too, and I want them to know it. It's been a bit of a slog - their Linux driver caused endless difficulties with X over two monitors, but whereever I can, I support companies who make it easier to use their products with open source.
I urge anyone else who has bought ATI because of this policy to say so here. It's useful to underline to ATI that it's a successfull policy.
"AMD will be releasing sanitized documentation for these new ATI GPUs in the coming weeks."
And as we know sanitized documentation generally tends to lead to under-developed code, thus rendering this somewhat useless for some things.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Or it could be cash-strapped ATI/AMD pushing the thankless task of writing their next drivers* upon the community. Someone doing their job for free? Now what business could turn that down?
*Let's not also forget ATI's reputation when it comes to drivers. As well as the fact that these documents will be sanitized.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Hate to tear you away from your fanboyism but you can indeed install just the drivers, and instead of using the catalyst control center (the part that requires .NET). You can use the ATI tray tools to do the same.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Also Nvidia's ahead in stream computing. As well as being easier to work with.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
But.. but... that's the idea behind all of it. Making them dependent. And making us dependent (trough loans).
I read, that if the world bank did not actively keep Africa poor, they would boom, because of all their subterranean resources.
Also I'm pretty sure, that the Internet makes it possible to gain knowledge and use that to make money, even in the poorest, most remote five-hut town, as long as they have cheap Internet access.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Then it wouldn't be a "movie".
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
You don't normally have to talk to the lawyers for company owned code. The lawyers just want to know:
1) Is there any third party owned code in it and what are the license terms?
2) Do you know if it infringes any patents?
The question of whether to release it then simply falls on the asset manager. Where I work, open-sourcing of company assets requires the permission of just one person and at least one team open-sources core code on a regular basis and another open-sources build system enhancements (eg Nant/CruiseControl.Net/boost-build stuff).
This should not be modded troll - it's a very clear description of the Foundation's activities.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Why can't it be both? I'd say the Gates Foundation has been far more successful at promoting Microsoft than some of their more direct efforts. [slashdot.org]
We all joke about his billions of dollars, but to see them put to use attempting to vaccinate an entire continent, I gotta tell ya that is a pretty damned impressive thing to do.
And was how the money made have any moral consideration?
Alfred Nobel made his fortune by selling munitions and other explosive substances which caused much death and suffering in his time. However he wanted to have a more noble (no pun intended) legacy than being remember as an arms dealer, so he created the Nobel Prize.
Does the fact that the money that created the prize was basically blood money make a difference?
Now Gates is obviously a different situation, but given that the operating system he was instrumental in making has historically (!) been so craptastic compared to alternatives available make his fortunate any less deserving? He may be trying to help the world in many ways, but he's also in affect whitewashing his name to a certain extent.
Buffett is also rich, but he did it by building solid companies selling solid products he believes in. Gates built a fortune on a historically crappy OS (recent versions have improved), and through various monopolistic practices that illegally killed competition. ("DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run.")
They buy vaccines at inflated prices from companies directly or indirectly owned by the foundation or it's founders, so a majority of the money they supposedly donate actually comes right back to them...
Those vaccines may prolong peoples lives, but it only treats the symptoms and not the root cause of the problem, thus the people who survive due to the vaccines may die for other reasons such as war or starvation, and those who survive will typically reproduce and increase the food shortage issues.
You need to teach these people about contraception... Shrink the population to a sustainable level, or nature will do it for you. And get rid of the greedy dictators who run many of these countries... Bill Gates is no different to these corrupt greedy third world leaders, he just operated in different circumstances. He had a higher power (the government) that restricted him from doing more extreme things, like physically killing his competitors... But who's to say he wouldn't have if he ran a third world country with noone to answer to instead of an american company?
He has time and again shown the same ruthlessness and disregard/disdain for his people/customers as the likes of Robert Mugabe.
We all joke about his billions of dollars, but to see them put to use attempting to vaccinate an entire continent, I gotta tell ya that is a pretty damned impressive thing to do.
Please read the following article before believing for one fucking second that Bill Gates is anything other than a wannabe Dr. Evil:
To be fair, BillyG might be nothing more than a hand puppet. There's no way to tell from here.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What's the best way to become involved? IRC? Website? Where? What?
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
...because they've only been in severe financial trouble for less than 90 days...
.there is enough of everything for everyone.
I am a Linux user who also likes to play 3D games, so it's been nvidia only for me for a long time. Now that we will hopefully start seeing some good open source 3D drivers coming out for ATI, I am definitely switching! I just hope nvidia realizes this and follows. So many times after a system software or kernel upgrade, poof, the closed nvidia driver stops working... causing me to have to CTRL-ALT-F1 to a root shell and modify xorg.conf just so I can get into X11 again to be able to fetch the newest driver. What a pain. Having open source 3D drivers for both would be awesome and a complete win for the Linux community.
What if this improved scheduler algorithm indirectly saved x-hundred-thousand kids?
So you're saying there are several hundred thousand poorly scheduled children out there? Interesting.
.there is enough of everything for everyone.
After having built a Nehalem system with HD4870 last week, all I can do is extend my joy and gratitude.
The moral of the story is; It pays to support those who support free software.
Huh? "The entire vaccination program is about intellectual property - countries have to forgo local pharma factories"?
Can you post a link about this?
Until OpenGL support is included in the driver, no enterprise linux graphics application will support ATI cards. I'm talking about the $30,000/seat graphics programs for linux that *only* support nvidia Quadro cards with nvidia drivers, because they conform to the OpenGL standard. OpenGL is still in use in a lot of places, and its not free or open-source.
Ignoring todays news, what's the state of support for the 4850 right now? Does it work flawlessly? I have some 3 year old ATI hardware and some older stuff. None of it quite works right with X. Running games is really hit or miss. Is the 4850 sort of semi-there on the Linux drivers, or is it working almost perfectly?
[...] taking into account the source of all that money in the first place? How much of the world's GDP has microsoft skimmed [...]
Also worth remembering that that legality of exactly how (at least a portion of) the skimming took place has been called into question on more than one continent.
Proprietary IP is a very important Asset to VC's and such. The accountants will definitely need to account for "giving it away" (I prefer the term investing in the open source community... natch ;-)
I assume the OpenGL/DRI code doesn't conflict with ACPI power management, i.e. you are still able to suspend/hibernate/resume?
You know what you're talking about. Thank you. To GP, shame on you for repeating conventional wisdom from 2000.
and Nvidia has been opening up.
In what bizarre universe that is nothing like ours is nVidia opening up? We have not seen a single specification from them. We have not seen a single code dump from them. The only thing we've even partially been "gifted" recently is yet-another-multimedia-acceleration-API, which would be totally useless to us if we had the means to implement one of the half-dozen or so other APIs that already exist (OpenMAX, XvMC, VA-API, etc).
As it stands, there's very little (read: not a single) chance that their gift API will ever be reimplemented, so it will only ever be useful for nVidia users who happen to build patches for their respective media players. Boy, what a great gift.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world moves to being more open, while Apple and Khronos are inventing OpenCL which will allow anyone to write code for any GPU, ATi's dumping code and specs as fast as their engineers can clean them up and ship them out, we've got people in the community porting the ATi drivers to the new memory managers (TTM right now, but GEM support is coming), other community members getting Mesa-LLVM building for the first time, and Intel's hired in even more Linux developers to hack on their drivers and to pull GEM into the mainline kernel.
nVidia sure is doing a lot for us these days.
My mistake.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Like the man said, it's a legacy best forgotten.
It should be modded troll when it's entirely supposition with no sources, no proof, and no citations whatsoever.
My current card is an ATI 3850, which I bought because of promising open-source 3D but I just upgraded to KDE 4.1 and I got tired of waiting for open source 3D drivers (since the fglrx drivers suck, they crash my system) so I just ordered an nvidia 9600GT card since their closed source drivers were pretty good.
My next card will probably be an ATI again, assuming I can get open source hardware acceleration by then.
Since 1995 I have bought:
1 S3
1 Tseng Labs
3 Matrox
~8 Nvidia
1 ATI
That's nice. But what I need is something like CUDA (form NVIDIA).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Contraception doesn't work. The people we are talking about are primarily subsistence farmers. Another child to help tend the fields means a better chance of surviving the off-season. Birth 12 so you still have 2 to support you in your old age after childhood diseases, war, and accidents kill off the rest. Contraception is antagonistic to their lifestyle. Changing the realities they face takes a lot more than some extra food and the availability of medicine, but it is a start. A better start would be cheap sustainable water purification, access to seed developed to thrive in their climates, and fertilizer. Continue that with a means of making an income (something to export, cottage industry style) and a lot of things become possible without external intervention.
The issues driving the Gates foundation and others to contribute to the third world are complex and far from altruistic. There is a similar if somewhat less sinister complexity behind the release of previously proprietary code and/or specs. There are dozens of reasons why AMD would be making their developments available to the public. The fact that they have means they have decided that it will offer their competitors no advantage in the Windows world at the very least. Certainly there are other negatives that had to be overcome or offset by the positives stemming from an open-sourcing of their spec. I'm in no position to elucidate on the subject, so I'm going back into my hole now.
-1 raving lunatic; +6 subGenius... Things even out...
Well, one can say that AMD is still paying debt to F/LOSS for spurring adoption of AMD64, especially in server space where before AMD wasn't present at all and now a major player.
Or probably they learned how to use F/LOSS community to their own advantage. After all for AMD it is another way to outsource driver development.
Frankly, given current proportion of nVidia vs. ATI install base, seeing that traffic in ATI related Linux forums outpaces similar nVidia forums by magnitude of 10 (and no, the messages are not all complains) I see that AMD/ATI gained quite publicity. If one build Linux box now, temptation to include ATI card - even for nVidia fan - is very real. Two years ago there were no question at all: nVidia was Linux standard.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Ahh... take a look at some of the political situations in Africa and I think you may come to the conclusion that it is not all the world bank's fault.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
While they revel in open-sourcing drivers for Linux, they still take away on the other hand any form of support for their Imageon processors.
Imageon GPUs are implemented in many phone and pda based embedded devices, and supposedly offer hardware 3D acceleration for such devices.
However, AMD/ATI has completely refused to give out any non-NDA documentation to let 3rd-party developers write apps against their ATI Handheld Interface (AHI), or to support the specific ATI extensions in the available OpenGL ES drivers.
3rd-party developers can't even create alternative 3D drivers to get past Qualcomm's current inept implementation
AMD/ATI is not as nice as you think they are.
I'll give the guy some recognition for spending his own money to do good. It's not like I have a billion dollars to spend eradicating malaria. Good on him.
But when his company uses sham "donations" of software licenses to reduce their tax liability, I have a problem with that. That means I have to pay some of their share. And when they do it to try to get a lock on the software market in the third world I have a problem with that too because now they're taking my money and spending it to harm people. That's the opposite of philanthropy.
If they care so much about Vista Licensee counts, sure, ship 8 million Vista licenses to people in Zimbabwe who have neither computers nor electricity but put each license in a box with a case of MREs and a few water purification tablets (or at least an edible box) so they actually get something useful out of it, ok? Is that so much to ask?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I agree. I'm buying four ATI in the next few months personally, and I'll be influencing technology purchasers for many thousands of units a year. NVidia can come open or go home now for all of me. I don't even care that the vast majority of those PCs will run Windows. I can't in good conscience help people choose a lock-in. I can't do it.
I've been favoring nv for their early proprietary Linux driver support for a long time. I really thought they would have been first with this.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
How much of the world's GDP has microsoft skimmed off the top? Money that would have been re-invested into the domestic economies all around the world, resulting in improved economic and living conditions without having to go through all the fat-cat middlemen, each taking their cut of that money before it eventually comes back around in the form of a "charity?"
The actual cash that gates has comes from people who want to buy his shares - they are quite happy to buy them. The increase in the share price is caused by the ability Microsoft has got to make $25 billion a year (0.03% of world GDP) selling windows and office - open source alternatives exist for both of these, so what I'm wondering is, if people need this investment for valuable investment, why don't they choose a free alternative?
The fat cat middlemen that you speak of are the people that buy microsoft products - and most of them give far less to charity than Gates does - so why do you prefer that they keep the money (and what right do you have to comment on how they spend it anyway?)
Interesting stats - Gates Foundation's spending accounts for 2.6% of global development aid ($2.6bn / $100bn) , compared to Microsoft total revenues which are 0.06% of global GDP ($60bn / $100trn). Don't you think it seems like you get a lot of charity bang for your windows buck?
Is there some kind of website where I can use paypal?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"