Why open source rocks – a new SM750 (Silicon Motion GPU) HDMI Driver

Another day, another proprietary GPU vendor leaving users stranded with half-baked Linux support—but then some random dev steps up and writes their own damn driver. The SM750 might not be a gaming beast, but it's in tons of embedded and server boards, and now it's got a working HDMI framebuffer driver thanks to open source. That's the whole point: when the vendor says "no," the community says "hold my beer." This isn't just about one chip, though. It's a pattern—open source fills the gaps that companies leave because they think Linux users are too small a market to bother with. The result? Hardware that would've been e-waste or a headache gets a second life. And the driver itself? It's on GitHub, so anyone can audit it, fix it, or fork it. Try doing that with a signed Windows driver from 2009. The deeper story here is about power dynamics. Proprietary drivers are a leash—you only get what the vendor decides you deserve, and only until they stop caring. Open source flips that. It's not always pretty, and it's not always bug-free, but it's yours. That's why projects like this matter beyond the SM750: they're a reminder that the best documentation is the source code, and the best support is a community that actually uses the thing. So yeah, hats off to the dev who did this. It's not glamorous work, but it's the kind of work that keeps Linux viable on hardware the big players forgot. And if you're running a board with an SM750, you just got a free upgrade in the form of a working HDMI output. That's open source doing what it does best: turning "unsupported" into "just works."