Originally posted by Dukenukemx
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Omg, I almost fell out of my chair. Great example of the cluelessness I was talking about (and also the fact that you don't actually know what you are talking about).
Firstly, NVidia did not open source their driver. They "opened" a small portion of their driver (which is not even open, hence the quotes, because as I said, the actual driver itself has been embedded in closed firmware in the GSP chip. What is opened is just an interface to that). Their actual driver, i.e. CUDA/OpenGL and all of that stuff is still closed source and inside their blob.
Sorry to say, but NVidia really doesn't give a s**t about Linus or anyone else in the open source community really. The only pressure they care about is $$$ and because they aren't losing any money from having a close sourced driver they don't care about it. If anything arguably they get more money from their closed sourced blob because their customers care more about having the latest stable driver over multiple kernel versions which is not possible with an in tree driver (which again hasn't changed at all, the part that NVidia open sourced is just buffer/memory management, CUDA which is what NVidia's paying customers care about is still closed and will likely always remain closed source).
Seriously, get a reality check. You can delude yourself that this "peer pressure" or "Linus giving his middle finger" works, but clearly you have never actually worked with NVidia or know how the company works. Heck I would be surprised if the management there (who are the one that call the shots) even know who Linus is.
The reason why they "opened" that very tiny part of their driver is so that it works better with the direction that the Linux desktop heading towards (i.e. Wayland/GBM) and to better debug problems which for technical reasons only really works when certain parts of the driver are in the tree (which is what NVidia did).
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