I'm aware of that. But look at the trouble we have even with the cooperative vendors. I'm sure they had a Windows driver from day zero.
However the situation with video drivers is already bad, and deteriorating. I had to hunt on the Internet to get my recent (FC4) distro to support my low-end embedded video (via). In the future it looks like even that won't work.
VIA is working with open source community. They are small enough
(comparatively) that they need every advantage. VIA is one of the
positive examples.
As others pointed out, rev-eng of programmable 3D hardware will be difficult. There will be a perpetual (and long) lag between the introduction of hardware and Linux support. The effort has to repeat for new revisions of the hardware. And a rev-eng driver can still not be trusted: who knows whether the register you just wrote into doesn't have some subtle side-effect.
Dumb with a capital 'D'.I hope you have a better solution.
Almost all of the solutions listed in this thread are better:
Chinese wall rev-eng,
funding, ...I want some too.