NVIDIA's "Open-Source Guy" Has Left The Company

One of the main public-facing figures to NVIDIA's open-source driver efforts has left the company to pursue a new opportunity.

Alexandre Courbot is likely a name you've crossed before if reading our past articles when it comes to NVIDIA code contributions to Nouveau, NVIDIA releasing signed firmware files, and occasional commentary on the mailing lists. Last Friday was his final day with NVIDIA.

Courbot wrote on Google+, "It was a difficult decision to make, but after an awesome 6 years ride with NVIDIA I have decided to move to new adventures...I consider myself particularly lucky that on top of working for one of the top employers in our field, I also got the chance for the last 3 years to work directly with one of the most welcoming and technically gifted OSS communities."

He also took this opportunity to praise the work done by the Nouveau community in working on an open-source NVIDIA driver. "One cannot really appreciate what the Nouveau project has achieved without looking closely at the driver itself and understanding how a handful of people maintain a graphics driver that supports virtually all generations of NVIDIA GPUs. This is an incredible feat that is sadly sometimes met with skepticism or ungratefulness, while it should simply inspire our respect."

Alexandre Courbot was the one who led the charge on releasing the Maxwell and Pascal firmware, changes to Nouveau, a lot of Tegra work, and much more. Hopefully NVIDIA has someone very capable to replace him and continue interacting with Nouveau. He's far from the only NVIDIA open-source/Linux developer at the company, but was one of the few public-facing developers interacting directly with Nouveau the past few years.

He also added, "On top of the technical quality of the project, it has been so much fun to work and chat with the Nouveau team. Hopefully this fun will continue as my next work should remain within the same extended community, although I am unlikely to directly work with Nouveau anymore." As far as where he's going next, he hasn't revealed. But before any speculations about him going to AMD or Valve based upon his comments about staying within the same extended community, in the comments he mentions he is staying within Japan.