AMD deciding _now_ what to do about Linux

[Chad]

On 6/15/07, Dotan Cohen <dotancohen at gmail.com> wrote:
> I wrote to AMD regarding the state of ATI Linux drivers and the
> company's view of the Linux community. This is the response I got:
>
> "Thanks - could you contact us again in July?  We're reviewing our Linux
> strategy right now, so anything I tell you know could be out of date in
> weeks."
>
> You can read the whole message here:
> http://dotancohen.com/eng/linux_compatibility.php
> Feel free to Digg or /. it.
>
> Friends, NOW is the time to contact AMD and to let them know that we
> need their support. Please, write to them, call them, now is the time.
> Even for those who don't use AMD products, the precedent set here will
> most certainly echo throughout the hardware world. Take the 5 minutes
> and convince AMD that the Linux community cannot be ignored.
>
> Note: I have posted this letter to several mailing lists. Those who
> know me from those lists will know that I don't, as a rule, crosspost.
> However, I felt this to be important enough to cross the line and
> crosspost to the lists I felt would be interested.
>
> Dotan Cohen
>
> http://lyricslist.com/
> http://what-is-what.com/
> _______________________________________________

I realize this is mostly geared towards Video Out.  However, if ATi
actually stepped up and started increasing Linux options, I would love
to see some of their capture devices better supported by them.  For
quite a while (and maybe still today, been a while since I've checked)
the only PCI Express x1 video capture card I could find had an ATi
Theater 550 (again IIRC) which was basically either framegrabber in
Linux or had nothing real to offer at all; while if I ran Windows I
could use the card to do (claimed) *hardware* encoding into a quite
usable mpeg2 format.

Anyway, just pointing out that ATi Linux support could be very cool
assuming they aren't just trying to "stay in the game" WRT Nvidia's
current level of "support".

-Chad