The Open Graphics Project and co-company Traversal Technology are not only producing open source drivers for their graphics cards, but are also releasing specifications for the cards. Unfortunately this doesn’t go all they way to a full open hardware release. They comment “While the hardware will be open spec, not all of it will be open source. This gives Traversal Technology the advantage it needs to recoup its non-recoverable engineering (NRE) costs.” Still, it’s a good step of progress towards openness. (If ATI and Nvidia came only half this far, it would revolutionize the Linux desktop.)
Traversal released a prototype last month, currently in testing. I wonder if we might see sales by the end of 2007?