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Because the documentation for the hardware is not open source. You need to sign very strict papers to be able to look at the hardware documentation which means few selected people have access to it which means not much support, etc. Can't remember why I know this but it was something related to my linux open source back in the days.

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I think things have shifted a bit away from that. IIRC, AMD's pretty free with the documentation for everything that isn't part of the DRM-enforcement chain, so their open source drivers are mostly lacking in manpower. NVidia just won't release the docs at all, so the open source drivers for them are reverse-engineered and plagued by problems like an inability to get most GPUs out of power-saving mode. I'm not sure how open Intel's documentation is, but their only Linux driver is the open-source one that they do significant in-house work on and it has often been competitive with the Windows driver.

Good to know it's moving towards a more open environment. Also good to know that my memory wasn't playing tricks on me. Thank you for the update.

AMD and Intel publish ISA documentation and design docs for their gpu parts. Intel usually does it same day as release, AMD usually do it a few months post release. Nvidia, Qualcomm, etc all release nothing, and therefor everything is proprietary and must be reverse engineered from scratch.

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