Further to this, no the ATI drivers for the ATI Radeon 8500 (also the FireGL) are non-free
So sourceforge hosts non-free software at http://dri.sf.net/ and http://gatos.sf.net/ or are they software ones? If they're software ones, why do they need kernel support?
[...] and for the Radeon 9000 and 9700 there is no support afaict (either free or non-free) all of these being the fastest ATI cards at the moment.
They work via vesa for now, though, but not as accelerated as they could be. I hear talk about code in CVS for them, but evidently that's not end-user stuff now.
[...] were the first company to get all of their mainstream cards working in Linux with full functionality. [...]
For some value of "working" in most cases I've seen.
The other pertinent information is that of course there is much technology in the drivers which is why Nvidia do not want to open them to the world at large as they are afraid that ATI et al will steal their technology and incorporate it into rival products.
Of course, this would mean *more* natural selection of ideas, *faster* development of new features (to keep their advantage) and *better* performance for the users, but more *work* for the hardware manufacturers, rather than relying on copyright to get an above-market-value price for their work. We should not have any part of this perversion of copyright to holds back progress. That's the opposite of why it was devised.
[...] What the free software community really needs in the way of support from the GFX manufacturing community would be the source of the windows drivers along with the specs of the hardware.
I'm not sure this would always help, as it might encourage people to repeat mistakes. Then again, experience does suggest otherwise.
Apologies if any questions are stupid, but this is something I'm still learning about by asking.