a promise of full specs for R500+ from AMD/ATI

LWN and Christopher Blizzard broke the news that AMD is planning to release full documentation for their graphics chips, R500 and newer. This is awesome. With specs, I imagine it will take the community 6 months or so to write a functional accelerated 3D driver…

This is particularly nice because it means that the ultimate free software machine is now a big step closer: AMD based (for LinuxBIOS support) with ATI graphics. The remaining problem is the availability of wifi devices that don’t require binary firmware – the older ralink-based ones seem to be unavailable now.

So, Nvidia, what are you going to do now? Your two main competitors have GPL’d drivers and/or full public specifications for their graphics chipsets. And you?