Club Linux Coffs Harbour

3D graphics support on free operating systems has been limited so far to products from nVidia, who release non-free drivers for their video cards, and ATI, who release both non-free and free-but-inferior-performance drivers.  The only thing required from manufacturers to have such products work flawlessly on a multitude of operating systems would be the release of some of the information on how their hardware works to the free software community.  Why should they instead put substantial effort into reducing the size of the market for their products?

LinuxElectrons has a few answers, straight from the horse's mouth.  Here's one I found particularly interesting:

"... [the hardware's] feature set plan usually has a price/performance spread. The engineers design the chips with this plan in mind and add registers that can enable and disable features either based on some outside hardware stimulus (strapping resistors) or secret registers that are accessible through software."

That is, when you're buying a cheap video card, you're actually buying an expensive video card with some features disabled.  If people knew how these cards worked, you could potentially enable the missing features and frustrate the manufacturer's pricing scam... er, strategy.