I certainly know about Nouveau. I even contributed to it, albeit indirectly (I'm the guy that wrote decuda). But reverse engineering GPUs is a thankless process

I certainly know about Nouveau. I even contributed to it, albeit indirectly (I'm the guy that wrote decuda). But reverse engineering GPUs is a thankless process, which has to be repeated for every new release of the hardware (in a certain sense, even for every stepping). Of course the tools are better these days so a part of reverse engineering can be done automatically, but still... And sure, having the userspace and kernel driver open source is only a start. But having everything that runs on the CPU open source is great from a separation-of-concerns perspective. Open sourcing the firmware and even the hardware itself would be cool, but is a battle for another day... And that'd no more be a matter of the just the GPU, but of all hardware that has firmware, including the CPU, network equipment, 3G radios...