AMD funded a drop-in CUDA implementation built on ROCm: It's now open-source

Why would this not be AMD’s top priority among priorities? Someone recently likened the situation to an Iron Age where NVIDIA owns all the iron. And this sounds like AMD knowing about a new source of ore and not even being willing to sink a single engineer’s salary into exploration.

My only guess is they have a parallel skunkworks working on the same thing, but in a way that they can keep it closed-source - that this was a hedge they think they no longer need, and they are missing the forest for the trees on the benefits of cross-pollination and open source ethos to their business.

DirectX vs OpenGL.

This brings back memories of late 90s / early 00s of Microsoft pushing hard their proprietary graphic libraries (DirectX) vs open standards (OpenGL).

Fast forward 25-years and even today, Microsoft still dominates in PC gaming as a result.

There's a bad track record of open standard for GPUs.

Even Apple themselves gave up on OpenGL and has their own proprietary offering (Metal).

Let's not forget the Fahrenheit maneuver by Microsoft that left SGI stranding and not forward OpenGL.