Bridgman Is No Longer "The AMD Open-Source Guy"

After five years of the open-source AMD strategy, John Bridgman is no longer managing these efforts.

John Bridgman was involved with the open-source AMD Linux efforts since the beginning five years ago when SUSE was contracted for the early open-source RadeonHD driver developments. He wrangled through lots of documentation to be publicly released, communicated with AMD customers, and managed the small open-source team at AMD. Originally it was just Bridgman and Alex Deucher at AMD while last year they picked up a few more.

Many Phoronix readers know John Bridgman because he was the most prolific contributor within the Phoronix Forums. Bridgman has more than 6,538 posts as of this morning that he's written in the past five years.

He's remained within the Phoronix Forums and frequently posts, but it wasn't until this week when realizing he's actually left his position at the head of the open-source AMD team. Bridgman has moved into working on AMD's new HSA efforts, the Heterogeneous System Architecture. With AMD HSA he's a Linux architect.

Michel Dänzer of AMD, one of their open-source developers, mentioned to me Bridgman's change of position this week while at XDC2012, which happened earlier this summer but didn't happen to realize it until now. On his profile page for the Phoronix Forums he's also updated his profile to reflect "Linux architect for HSA."

Replacing Bridgman at the open-source position is Tim Writer. Since June, Tim Writer is serving as the "Manager Embedded Linux and Open Source Graphics." Previous to entering the open-source arena, he was a senior member of their technical staff, an Embedded Computing Systems Division (ECSD) liaison engineer, and originally started out at AMD as a contractor working on Linux Core Engineering (their Catalyst binary blob). Writer has worked on AMD XvBA as talked about in an earlier Phoronix article.

You can still find Bridgman within the Phoronix Forums while hopefully Tim Writer will be joining soon to feed the open-source Linux graphics enthusiasts with more information.