Happy 3rd Birthday To AMD's Open-Source Strategy

It was three years ago on this day that we were the first to detail AMD's open-source strategy. Yep, it's only been three years since AMD became public with pushing out NDA-free GPU documentation and register specifications, open-source code for the xf86-video-ati and Mesa drivers, and employed a small set of developers to contribute towards their open-source Linux stack. It was also three years ago from this month that the now deceased RadeonHD driver was launched.

The 6th of September, 2007 was the date that AMD decided to let us share their open-source strategy with the world, which came days after exclusively detailing AMD's new Catalyst Linux driver at the time that finally leveled the playing field between AMD and NVIDIA for their proprietary Linux drivers. Work though towards this open-source strategy and the initial xf86-video-radeonhd development and other work had been going on in secret for months. It was on the 31st of May, 2007 that Novell's proposal to AMD for such an open-source ATI driver effort was dated. We were briefed on this strategy in early August of 2007.

We celebrated the one-year celebration of AMD's open-source efforts in Edinburgh, Scotland at the 2008 X Developers' Summit. This was with Egbert Eich and Luc Verhaegen of Novell, two of the original RadeonHD developers and open-source proposal authors, along with Jerome Glisse, the original developer behind the also-dead xf86-video-avivo driver for R500 class hardware and now a Red Hat employee working on the R600 Gallium3D driver, among other X.Org activities.

On the 17th of this month when it marks the three-year anniversary of the initial RadeonHD driver source-code release there will be the 2010 X Developers' Summit going on in Toulouse, France. Luc, Jerome, and Egbert are expected to be there along with Alex Deucher and Richard Li of AMD and plenty of other developers too, so perhaps we shall have to celebrate on that date as well. Stay connected via Twitter / Identi.ca / RSS / Facebook for our coverage.