During the state of the Linux round-table discussion on the first day of the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, James Bottomley (Linux kernel developer) had asked the panelists what are the top two things each panelist would like from the Linux community. Among the panelists was Google’s Chris DiBona, who is the open-source program manager at Google. His response was interesting when he had said the following: “I would love to get either NVIDIA and ATI to actually give us the specs on the drivers we want or let’s just reverse engineer everything and do it ourselves.”

It looks like AMD may be making good on a promise made at the Red Hat Summit in May. AMD is working with the community to release a 2D-accelerated Linux graphics driver, with 3D acceleration being part of the future plans. The official AMD press release states: “In the coming months AMD also plans to accelerate efforts to address the needs of the open source community as well.” But what does this mean? Are they opening up the fglrx driver? Are they providing specifications? Are they just making a better binary blob so the open-source community will just want reverse engineer it more?

?As client computing on Linux continues to grow so has our support and focus on delivering best-in-class performance and compatibility for our products,? said Ben Bar-Haim, vice president of software, Graphics Product Group at AMD. ?In the second half of 2007 we plan to deliver the most significant enhancements for ATI Radeon graphics ever for Linux and reaffirm our commitment to consumer users and the community as a whole.?

With companies like Dell and Google encouraging AMD/ATI to offer open source 2D and 3D graphics drivers, it looks like there is finally enough pull in the market to make it happen!