Intel Corp., the worlds largest processor and graphics supplier, announced today that it will unveil the inner workings of its software to the open-source community, aiming to promote development.

The company, effective today, will begin distributing source-code to graphics drivers that control its graphic chips to the development community, free of charge. The company hopes to accelerate development of the software by using the open-source community.

We're releasing them now to demonstrate our ongoing commitment to providing free software drivers for Intel hardware, Intel developer Keith Packard announced.

By open sourcing the drivers for this new technology, Intel enables the open source community to experiment, develop and contribute to the continuing advancement of open source 3-D graphics.

According to Intel, the drivers made available for download are a first release, which still needs significant testing, tuning and bug fixing before they'll be ready for production use.

The move may also accelerate adoption of Intel graphics chips into the Linux community as well. Driver availability has long been an issue of contention for Linux distributions, particularly in the video space where most remain proprietary.

Graphic chip rival, Nvidia Corp., already supports Linux and invests a large number of resources into Linux software, however Intel remains the largest provider of graphics chips world wide.

Intel took a commanding lead over the competition with 40.3 percent of the graphics market in the second quarter of 2006, according to a report by Jon Peddie Research, a graphics consultancy firm.

Electronics Intel