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Along with all the good responses to your question, it's worth pointing out that Intel has completely open-sourced their driver and GPU, and ATI has open-sourced their GPU and produced a driver that can do about 90% of what the closed-source driver can do.

P.S. Broadcom open-sourced a part of their GPU for the Raspberry Pi. (Specifically the VideoCore IV VPU on the BCM21553 which RasPi is porting to the BCM2835 http://www.raspberrypi.org/a-birthday-present-from-broadcom/ )



Corrections:

Intel open sourced their driver not their GPUs.

Broadcom open sourced part of the software running on one of their GPUs, not their GPUs.


I understand what you're saying, that the situation is not completely clear-cut (especially what Broadcom is doing).

But Intel has most definitely documented their GPU registers and hardware – not just the intel open source driver:

https://01.org/linuxgraphics/documentation/driver-documentat...


That is not the same as open sourcing the GPU itself. They haven't released HDL source for the chips themselves.




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