Probably a point in the middle would be the right compromise, most people think its binary (its closed hardware or its free+open) but I don't; I think there should be a hardware company (with all the stack: GPU + CPU + kernel) that goes the same way Epic went with Unreal (their game engine); meaning you can use their hardware for free and the specs are public but if your company evers get more than 50K in profits you have to pay them 20% of your profits; or something like that.
Yesss I've been waiting for this moment for nearly two decades haha :)
And it's definitely possible, just look at the C64 and Amiga demoscene. Those machines haven't evolved for ages, but they've been making them do one (thought to be) "impossible" thing after another for a very long time after the platforms were essentially considered dead. I've seen things at demoparties around 2000 where C64 demos showed stuff that was thought to be impossible to do on these machines (or so I was told, I'm not an expert on the C64's capabilities, but the thing runs in the single megahertzes and doesn't have a divide instruction, so yeah). One I remember had a part with a veeery low resolution realtime raytracer, about 10fps I think, the scene consisting of just a plane and a sphere (IIRC) ... but it was done on a C64.
I wonder how long it will take for PCs though. Moore's Law broke already a few years ago didn't it? But it's not really happening, so far. Or maybe it is. I haven't been keeping up with what's happening in the PC demoscene lately. They used to be way ahead of the curve compared to PC videogames, this changed somewhere in the 200Xs, probably because around that time videogames started getting Hollywood-size budgets.
