NVIDIA Gets Into Open-Source Hardware With A Ventilator Design

[reavertm]

You sure can consider being life-long NVidia customer when we are talking about life-saving equipment. I'm not sure I would like to be one though.

[piotrj3]

You need to realize tow things:
1. Nvidia has a lot of open source projects already. See https://developer.nvidia.com/open-source and https://github.com/NVlabs
2. For their video driver, they have invested a lot into building one driver to work on various platforms. It is how they can justify supporting platforms with single digit market share.

So they're not inherently hostile towards open source. But as much as we'd like to see an open source driver from them, that's not going to happen until it makes sense from a financial point of view. I.e. hope for such a driver, but don't hold your breath

I think imo Nvidia might do something now in direction of open source driver either by helping nouveau or totally creating new open source driver from scratch. But you have to remember that is not trivial task to open source an existing driver since it might depend on a lot of code that is propertiary. Why I think nvidia will do a move? Because if AMD or someone else does something like that sharpening filter and so on, Nvidia immediantly follows, sometimes to a point they release that stuff ahead of AMD. Of course open-sourcing driver is not that trivial, but I think Nvidia at this point might consider that from business perspective it is worth it.