@tygrus EXA is an acceleration architecture, one of many (XAA, UXA, NV's one, etc). Each have strengths and weaknesses, but the proprietary driver does have 2D acceleration.

The current closed source ATI driver offers no hardware 2D (EXA) acceleration so they can't open source what they haven't got.

I do not think it makes sense to avoid AMD or NV drivers because they are not open sourced. Why should I buy a high end video card and saddle it with 2nd rate drivers, or a not-hw-accellerated OpenGL, or worse yet the SVGA driver?

It makes sense at all. AMD does not have enough resources in driver's development to support wide range of products. Even, AMD did not provide unified laptop's drivers.

The more open source the merrier.