http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=65731
I don’t know how Blenderheads could help sort the “problem”. I highly doubt that there is anyone here who is capable of writing low level device driver code. Not to mention that the majority of them are children and I don’t think that respectable companies will respond to a small gathering of children calling for changes to their professional product line.
Also, I don’t think there is necessarily a problem with proprietary drivers. People who make devices are within their rights to produce drivers for whatever system they choose for the reason that they are not obliged to disclose information about the hardware design. Yes it sometimes bugs me too but OS manufacturers get round these issues by providing well defined developer APIs. With the OS diversity amongst the Linux community, this is not easily achieved - though it could be by removing the diversity.
The solution presented is to encourage them to make a specific chip that caters solely to the Linux community. So are there any available already?:
“Currently, the market for such cards is not served very well.”
But it will be popular if it comes out?:
“Due to market size it will not be possible to compete on 3d performance with market leaders such as ATI and NVIDIA.”
But at least you will have made a truly open card?:
“While the hardware will be open spec, not all of it will be open source.”
Good features though?:
“An initial version of such a card will likely be limited to being single-headed with a single video-output. TV-out may be an option but may not be usable together with vga out at the same time”
When a Linux user can go out and buy a relatively cheap GPU from a good manufacturer and run GPU accelerated software well (doesn’t Blender run better under Linux than Windows?), I don’t see a need for a project like this.
Lastly, please stop implying the open source community consists solely of Linux users. Open source and proprietary are not mutually exclusive and can co-exist quite harmoniously. The traditionally proprietary community has taken the step towards embracing open source. I think the Linux community needs to do the same for proprietary technology.
Maybe the world would be a better please if everything was open and free but that’s never going to happen. The world works on trade, competition and the money produced by them and openness doesn’t always fit.