NVIDIA drivers now Open Source

[Geffers]

Seems 11 May 2022 was a milestone for the Linux, and ultimately, the gaming community.

NVIDIA have open sourced their video drivers.

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Geffers

 

[Retro]

Now that's interesting and suggests to me that desktop Linux might actually be going a little more mainstream than it was. NVIDIA will want to ensure market penetration, not letting AMD have it all.

 

[Arantor]

It's interesting that this has happened; it makes me wonder how they intend to keep their competitive advantage because that's historically been the reason for keeping the drivers closed, so that it takes much more time/effort for the rivals to pick them apart and figure out how to make better gear.

Then again this also presumes that nVidia's drivers will be any better; yes, there's been closed drivers as blobs for years, and many people didn't particularly care about the open source part of it - there's a lot more pragmatists than ideologues in the Linux world (though there are many more ideologues in the FOSS world than there are in the Windows world for sure), for whom openness is a nice to have rather than a requirement. But my memory of nVidia's Linux drivers is that they were all pretty rubbish anyway, closed or not.

 

[Retro]

It will be interesting to see if this openness results in better Linux drivers. I wouldn't bank on it.