Nvidia joins Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation association has been replenished with four new companies: Fluendo, Lineo Solutions, Mocana and Nvidia ( press release ). Especially noteworthy is the last one on this list - Nvidia. After all, now we can say that the Linux Foundation alliance includes three of the world's largest manufacturers of graphics for the PC - Intel, AMD and Nvidia, and Intel and AMD made it many years ago.

For all Linux users who work with Nvidia GPUs, this is good news. After all, earlier this company attached a strictly closed approach, that is, it published only proprietary code and refused to participate in the open source project of Nouveau to create open drivers, so that Nouveau activists had to rely only on reverse engineering. Unfortunately, the quality of the Nouveau drivers is often inferior to the original Nvidia drivers in performance and power consumption. Perhaps something will change in the future, the very fact that Nvidia joins the Linux Foundation is encouraging.

However, right now Nvidia does not promise anything of the kind and is not going to disclose driver code for Tegra and others in the near future. As you know, members of the Linux Foundation are not the most open source activists like VIA, Adobe and Oracle, that is, the fact of joining the alliance does not guarantee that the company will suddenly begin to stamp open source projects.