It's telling about the whole graphics programming scene that this has been such a well kept secret from the public. Games you see are not in reality running on open APIs, but are based on back alley arrangements between insiders camouflaged as open API apps. I bet this post is very demoralizing eg. to hopeful indie game devs or people holding out hope for driver situation improving on Linux.
Actually I think this points to a potential area of success on Linux. One of the points the post brings up is that there is only a very small group of people who have access to the Microsoft kernel code, the driver code, and the game code. On Linux, this pool is vast. With open source kernel and open source drivers, game developers can dig all the way through the stack to understand the entire system. I would hope this leads to better APIs that expose the nature of the system directly, and not having to impose workarounds for specific games inside the driver itself.
This has never been a secret. On Windows there's even a tool for nVidia cards that will let you see all the builtin workarounds for various applications and let you define some of your own.
Whether the game is running on an open API can be moralizing or demoralizing to an open source/culture advocate, not to a indie game developer - the latter would care more about speed of development, robustness, access to sales, etc.
