To be honest, I don't quite know what this means. Optimistically, Linux may have better ATI driver support in the future?

Source: http://lwn.net/Articles/248227/

Releasing specs for a 3D part. That's quite interesting, as that hasn't happened before. The last graphics card to be publicly specified ended up being cloned in Taiwan (from specs only) 6 months later -- this was in the early 90's AFAICT.

There's some chance that, if this is true, the AMD/ATI 3D instruction set will become a de facto standard for GPGPU processing applications, which would of course favor AMD in the short run -- like the x86 instruction standard has favored Intel. We'll see what happens in the long run.

In the meanwhile, yes, it really does sound like this will enable better (and more frequently updated) graphics drivers for ATI cards on Linux, at least in the long run.

I'd rather see more progress on the video overlay side of things. I don't really play games on my linux box (since there aren't that many anyway) so I never use the 3D features.

It has been more than a year since Intel made such a big deal of open sourcing its drivers, and there is still no support or documentation for XvMC. Perhaps AMD/ATI will be different, but breath holding is not recommended.