Comment They have been, but there's a snag (Score 2) 309
That being their drivers suck. Also that writing GPU drivers is hard and the OSS community hasn't done a good job.
AMD released a bunch of hardware info, and what code they could (they can't just open up all of their proprietary driver, there are things in it they legally can't release). There were claims of an absolutely amazin' driver that would be made, better than Windows, that there were thousands of skilled OSS programmers who were chomping at the bit to work on it.
Well that was mostly just people bragging on places like
So ya, not really helping them. What the OSS community wants is for someone to write an nVidia quality driver, and open it up. Do all the work and then hand it out. Doesn't seem like anyone is interested in doing that. In part that is because some of what makes those closed drivers good is IP that gets licensed that can't be open sourced.