In my experience, and apparently the experience of others, finding a graphics card which is supported by open source drivers is a bit of a challenge. Either the open source driver support is poor or limited, or there are simply no open source drivers at all. Many people resort to buying used cards from eBay.

Frustrated, I have decided to start a project to solve the problem. Since I am a chip designer, and I work for a company that sells graphics cards, I decided to approach management with the idea, and they agreed that if I could justify it economically, we would do it. The primary objective is to produce a graphics product which has fully open documentation and fully open source driver.

When I first brought up the idea on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, it received quite a bit of attention. Lots of discussion on LKML resulted in an article on kerneltrap.org, followed by a link from Slashdot.

Now, there is a mailing list dedicated to this project which can be found at: http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics

A preliminary feature spec can be found at: http://open-graphics.duskglow.com/openspec.pdf or http://www.techsource.com/Open_Graphics/Open_Graphics_Spec.pdf

In addition, one of the list members put online a petition pertaining to pricing of the proposed graphics card: http://www.petitiononline.com/3dc4rdlb/petition.html (I think the petition will be valuable feedback for the company to determine viability.)

As someone who uses Linux as his primary platform, both at home and at work, I would really love to see something like this come to fruition.

Unfortunately, the attention people have paid to this project has started to wane. I figure either people really aren't that interested, or they just don't know about it. I decided to test the waters by posting to a few different forums around on the web. It turns out that there are plenty of interested people, but they just haven't heard about it because word hasn't spread.

Although my employer is capable of and willing to help me to market this, they have not taken an intrusive role in the project, in part because they understand that this is not a normal project. This is more of a community project than it is a "Tech Source" project, and they have respected that. Unfortunately, being an engineer rather than a sales person, I haven't had huge success on my own in generating the necessary awareness among those who would be interested in this sort of thing.

To that end, I would like to humbly ask interested parties who read this to please pass the word around. (And also participate in the discussions and development process.)

I hope you don't see this as a plea for free advertizing but rather as an opportunity to take part in the development of graphics hardware which is compatible with Free Software principles. I honestly believe that there is a major need, and I would like to be part of meeting that need.


Sincerely,


Timothy Miller
Tech Source, Inc.