AMD commit numerous updates to the open source driver community, three months ago, and has otherwise assisted the Linux community in the past. The same has not been true for NVIDIA. Despite a respectable (albeit lacking compared to Windows) proprietary driver for Linux, this GPU vendor was not adored by the community. They have not been accused of malice, it would just seem to be control over both the end-user experience and, of course, their secret sauce.
Well, NVIDIA is being more cooperative.
I, obviously, do not have a crystal ball of fortune telling (the journalist house of auction ran out and the gift shop is just too expensive) so it is anyone's guess the future extent of NVIDIA's involvement. For now, their assistance included 42 pages of Device Control Block documentation and proprietary developers answering questions on the Nouveau mailing list.
Many, from Ars Technica to our staff discussions at PC Perspective, note how the change of heart aligns with the SteamOS announcement. I do not really believe these events are related if only because I doubt NVIDIA would wait to contact developers until Valve spoke up. I would have to expect that SteamOS would not be a surprise to NVIDIA especially after Gabe Newell discussed Maxwell virtualization all the way back at CES.
You would think they would have come about while working with NVIDIA on the game streaming technology. You know, allow a single desktop to utilize multiple games across multiple devices. Even still, you would think NVIDIA would just put even more effort into their proprietary driver rather than help Nouveau.
Either way, we will keep an ear out for NVIDIA involvement with the open source community.
Heh… These dudes aren’t
Heh… These dudes aren’t slick. This has everything to do with Valves announcement the other day
What can you expect from
What can you expect from nVidia? Its not that they only
make favors if they would get something in return from it, but
partly a dirty player opportunist which in this case, thinks
that they would get a lot of sympathy and favors from the
Linux peeps more importantly its large community of developers
who hates them BUT, they can turn the tides around they just
have to spend a lot of money bribing developers and companies
who are into linux dev where they can get favors with but in
the end Nvidia will get them selves stabbed at their backs in
times of their hardships while losing a lot of bribe money
specially now what AMD is into a lot of support as far as helping
and supporting linux dev community in general is concerned and
with now with their newly released GPU featuring MANTLE, it will
make a lot of Windows and Linux dev peeps to develop much
resource efficient games and APPS THAT UTILIZES GPU processing
that runs in windows and of course in LINUX as WELL.
Tho dont get me wrong nVidia and no offense to them, they
have a lot of things to make you proud of specially if you’re an
owner of either a GTX690, GTX680, GTX780 or Titan, coz they still
hold the record for the fastest GPU card that money can buy to
day, for now that is…
Two whole comments. That goes
Two whole comments. That goes to show how so few people care what Linux users want. If we don’t care, why should nVIDIA? What’s in it for them? A handful of graphics card sales? Linux users aren’t exactly buying the latest and greatest every year.