OPEN NVIDIA

Jon Masters has been involved with Linux for more than 22 years.

Rather surprisingly I can happily write about the release of an actual open source graphics driver released by Nvidia. This has been a long time coming. I don’t expect to say this often (I’d love to be proven wrong), but kudos to Nvidia for the engagement with open source. That said, it’s not as “open” you might assume, but it’s still a dramatic improvement upon where we were.

When you think about it, it’s less surprising that Nvidia would do this now. It’s finally getting more competition (from Intel, which know how to do open source graphics drivers), the “crypto” market is tanking, and there are emerging opportunities in edge and HPC that would be much better served by providing open source drivers for users.

Those deploying large HPC clusters are likely to be unimpressed by needing to also deploy a giant proprietary binary blob into their kernels.

I must confess to only having used the proprietary Nvidia driver on very rare occasions, mostly on principle. In fact, this kept me from buying its hardware for a long time, and consequently meant that I didn’t play with technologies like CUDA until they were already quite mature. I would be quite surprised if there are people who haven’t felt a need to ultimately touch those proprietary drivers, such is their reach, but this move could even drive sales.

Perhaps this is also a reminder of the value served in staying strong and sticking to core principles. The community pushes back for years, and adding GPL_ONLY kernel symbols may have made the ultimate difference.