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As part of the initiative AMD says it will be collaborating with the open-source community and companies such as Red Hat and Novell to develop 2D and 3D drivers that support all the latest Radeon chipsets, beginning with the R500.

It also promises to release the documentation so that anyone can build their own drivers from scratch, with 2D documents coming first followed at a later date by 3D, though there's no suggestion as of yet concerning a timetable.

The announcement is good news for Linux users who have struggled with poor graphics driver performance and support over the years. With Intel already committed to open-source development of its graphics drivers, only Nvidia now holds on to the idea of proprietary development.