Former Nouveau Lead Developer Joins NVIDIA, Continues Working On Open-Source Driver

[mdedetrich]

The government should have broken up Nvidia ages ago, but they refuse to do so....

Over what? They aren't a monopoly in any area, even AI which is their massive cash cow. I mean if you want to break up NVidia then you may as well argue for breaking up Valve due to the mass success of their Steam in PC

The case with NVidia is extremely different to lets say Apple (with the App store on iPhone).

[TemplarGR]

Over what? They aren't a monopoly in any area, even AI which is their massive cash cow. I mean if you want to break up NVidia then you may as well argue for breaking up Valve due to the mass success of their Steam in PC

The case with NVidia is extremely different to lets say Apple (with the App store on iPhone).

They are essentially a monopoly in both machine learning/ai/gpgpu and in dgpu gaming and have been for many years. They are also price fixing with AMD too. Look at the insane profits Nvidia has made the last decade, while they pretended their prices went up because of covid, bitcoin, and other BS, the real reason was they thought they could get away with it, and did.

The issue is that they have been using many monopolistic practices over the years, like gameworks and other shit they do in collaboration with game developers.

Oh and by the way, if a company holds 70%-80% of a certain market, they are essentially a monopoly. dgpus are dominated by Nvidia, as shown in steam surveys. You don't have to own 100% of the market to be considered a monopoly.

As for Steam, it is not a monopoly because there are many, many avenues to get games from. Physical releases always existed, and too many alternate stores exist, including Epic's....

[Blademasterz]

While those big corpo getting rich day by day I hope they are useful when the world is collapsing 🙂

[dragon321]

Why then did he resign as Nouveau maintainer?

Let's think... Nah, I don't know why GPU company might want to offer job to somebody who spent years on developing drivers for their hardware. Obviously not because companies are interested with experienced people or something.

The amount of conspiracy theories in this thread is pretty interesting.

[ahrs]

Why then did he resign as Nouveau maintainer?

Probably to avoid a conflict of interest and not to make it look like a hostile takeover? It's better for him as an Nvidia employee if he has to answer to somebody non-affiliated with Nvidia. The main DRM maintainer that the others have to answer to is a Red Hat employee completely unaffiliated with the big GPU vendors for the same reason.

At least if Nvidia ruins Nouveau then people can point the finger squarely at Red Hat for allowing it to happen.

[MrCooper]

If Nvidia actually starts to become FOSS-friendly AMD is dead on arrival. AMD's ace up its sleeve has always been its embrace of FOSS, they lose a lot of the value proposition if nvidia stops being toxic to the ecosystem.

Even if they did decide to truly embrace FOSS and provide something comparable to amdgpu, it would take them years to catch up to AMD.

[darkbasic]

The amount of conspiracy theories in this thread is pretty interesting.

What's the conspiracy theory? I'm simply stating that hiring a former Nouveau developer doesn't necessarily mean hiring him to work on Nouveau.

[fitzie]

I love big evil corps especially when their hardware is good and drivers are open sourced. i would happily switch to to nvidia if their opensource driver gets up to snuff. It would be a shame to leave radeon after so long and how good they've treated the linux community, but their cards have been #2 for so long and they haven't gotten their software stack together both in terms of CUDA compatability and in terms of stability, nor making the leaps necessary to stay competitive at the high end. As for the business side of things nvidia is not a monopoly because they didn't exert their status to prevent competition or to control another market like other monopolies do.

[arabek]

Oh how you all are in the dark. Nvidia hired Ben to phase out the binary only driver in favor of Nouveau, but everyone is here with batshit crazy theories. Instead of giving out all the support to Ben, you all are just trolling. Nuff said.

[reba]

Oh how you all are in the dark. Nvidia hired Ben to phase out the binary only driver in favor of Nouveau, but everyone is here with batshit crazy theories. Instead of giving out all the support to Ben, you all are just trolling. Nuff said.

That's a pretty bold claim. Source please.