Originally posted by asdx
I'm not sure they are particularly motivated to try and take legal action against the Nouveau folks as-is (in fact I rather doubt they would), but neither are they going to come out and say, "Yep, go ahead, RE our drivers; that's a good way to develop open drivers for our hardware! Release some open documentation while you're at it!"
That kind of attitude is just NOT the way Nvidia works as a company. They don't "get" open source at all, save for maybe half a dozen people in the entire company. And those people aren't the senior execs calling the shots; they're people "like bridgman but at Nvidia" (middle managers or worker bees). They can't turn the gears of the company; they are the gears.
It's too bad, because both of Nvidia's major x86 graphics competitors (Intel and AMD) are a LOT more open about publicly supporting official open source graphics drivers. But Nvidia would never do that, whether the implementation of the drivers were "clean room" or "reverse engineered" or even "officially supported by Nvidia". They just don't like open source at all, because there's a risk of their precious "IP" leaking to AMD and giving AMD an edge. Ohnoes!
(Aside: The final jab in the stomach for Nvidia is that, despite remaining as selfishly proprietary as possible, the community's RE efforts have done a great job of providing AMD easily-obtaining information about how their competitor's hardware works, and they could probably use this to help them improve their own products if they wanted to. Might be a contributing factor to why AMD's harwdare is so outstanding and extremely competitive / better than Nvidia's since about the HD4000 generation!)
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