Celebrating Graphics and Compute Freedom Day

Hobbyists, activists, geeks, designers, engineers, etc have always tinkered with technologies for their purposes (in early personal computing, for example). And social activists have long advocated the power of giving tools to people. An open hardware movement driven by these restless innovators is creating ingenious versions of all sorts of technologies, and freely sharing the know-how through the Internet and more recently through social media. Open-source software and more recently hardware is also encroaching upon centers of manufacturing and can empower serious business opportunities and projects.

The free software movement is cited as both an inspiration and a model for open hardware. Free software practices have transformed our culture by making it easier for people to become involved in producing things from magazines to music, movies to games, communities to services. With advances in digital fabrication making it easier to manipulate materials, some now anticipate an analogous opening up of manufacturing to mass participation.

It is important to keep sharp open hardware's more transformational edges, on agendas such as dismantling intellectual property and releasing investment for alternative business models. Only through a mix of craft, politics, and the support of social movements, will open hardware fully realize its potential to democratize technology.

There are numerous organizations and initiatives voiced and supported by the Open Source Hardware Association and a vast thriving community of supporters and technology enthusiasts that are doing to advance this core value. The Open Source Hardware Association aims to be the voice of the open hardware community, ensuring that technological knowledge is accessible to everyone, and encouraging the collaborative development of technology that serves education, environmental sustainability, and human welfare.

Technology and culture ought to respect user freedom. A year ago, AMD made a giant leap towards a fully open-source Linux graphics and compute stack driver stack. While still offering proprietary hardware running proprietary firmware, having the driver and the libraries as open-source software opens the potential for modification and performance optimization. In addition, it gives other GPU manufacturers, including NVIDIA and Intel, a standard to aim for. Finally, it gives hope that there will be further openness in the future.

This is why we celebrate Graphics and Compute Freedom Day, GCFD for short. We want to take one day every year to remember all the open standards, open-source software, and open hardware that have made it into the mainstream in the field of computer graphics and GPU computing. It has been exactly one year since AMD has unveiled GPUOpen on 15th December 2015; let's celebrate GCFD and let's hope that this year is just the start of many more successful years of graphics and compute freedom.