AMD announced a major strategic initiative to support the Open Source development community for ATI Radeon graphics processors. The week of September 10th, AMD plans to provide an open source information and development package supporting the ATI Radeon™ HD 2000 series as well as ATI Radeon X1000 series of graphics processing units (GPU) on Linux desktops.

As announced at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo, AMD has been unveiled as a Platinum Sponsor of openSUSE providing it with powerful infrastructure upon which the openSUSE Build Service (OBS) can be run. More from the press release:

Transmeta, the company Linus Torvalds once worked for in 1997 through 2003 has just announced an investment of $7.5 million from AMD in exchange for preferred stock.

SageTV, LLC, a leading developer of PVR, Media Center and Placeshifting software solutions, today announced support for AMD's recently announced AMD LIVE! Home Cinema and Home Media Server consumer electronics platform designs.

Tell them what you think about the state of their drivers. You may ask for a fully open source driver (like Intel does) and/or better specifications for the x.org developers. Also tell them about your economic decisions in the graphics market.

Maybe you've seen many good Open Source projects that are no longer maintained. One of the many reasons for that may be lack of contribution. In fact, there are many one-man projects out there. Most of any program's users are just that, users, not developers. Nevertheless, average users still can contribute to Open Source programs to make them better.

Major open source projects like GNOME, KDE, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and Apache all have something in common -- they all have Planet feed reader sites set up to aggregate developer blog feeds. The Planet software was developed to power Planet GNOME and Planet Debian, but now it's being used by dozens of open source projects. With just a few simple steps, you can set up a Planet aggregator to watch your favorite blogs or to help publicize your favorite project.

Red Hat today announced the growing adoption of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network solutions by several leading higher education institutions, including Wake Forest University, the University of Washington and Vanderbilt University. These top-tier universities have made the switch to Red Hat to deliver affordable, high-performing solutions for mission-critical applications with trusted support, manageability and security.