There's some interesting discussion happening currently around AMD's proprietary microcode for its Radeon hardware on Phoronix: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?116965-Nouveau-NVIDIA-s-New-Ha... (scroll down to the third last comment on the page, and continue from there) bridgeman is one of the engineers at AMD who knows a lot about the GNU/Linux GPU driver developers and hardware manufacturing process, so it's great to have someone such as him discuss his personal views on the microcode issue. It's especially interesting to learn that both AMD and the FSF tried to get board vendors to distribute the microcode on a chip instead of relying on operating system distributions to deliver it, but nobody wanted to pick up the expense for the flash chips. Anyway, I think some of you will find it worth a read (but mind the trolls!), and it would be a good time to post anything else on the topic that needs to be said while we have the attention on this issue from somebody at AMD. Cheers, Adam