NVIDIA Receives a Positive One Finger Salute from Linus for Doing Things Right

Many of you may recall that back in June of 2012, we talked about how NVIDIA was given a rather direct message courtesy of none other than Dr. Linus Torvalds himself. Basically, the article written by XDA Recognized Developer AdamOutler went on about the closed nature of both NVIDIA and Qualcomm as chipset manufacturers, and how it was shameful and really inexplicable how two companies with such closed minded ideals could possibly be the paramount chipset providers for a large number of Android device manufacturers. Adam went on to wrap up the article with a brief (but very powerful) video on what the father of the Linux kernel thought about their lack of support for the open source world. Needless to say, shocked and appalled NVIDIA released a statement not long after in an attempt to address some of the finer points of the rather graphical complaint. Without going into the nitty gritty of the response itself, Adam basically dismantled their apology/explanation piece by piece. Their words, not being backed up by their actions, meant little to nothing.

Fast forward a year-and-a-half later, and we see something coming out of the left field: a completely unexpected move by NVIDIA, which left a whole lot of people trying to think back to what Dr. Torvalds said in the past. In a nutshell, you may recall that earlier this year, NVIDIA announced at CES the arrival of a “192-core” processor, the Tegra K1. This monster of a computerized brain was believed to be, much like its predecessors, as closed source as feasibly possible. So, while it was exciting to see such next generation hardware on the verge of hitting the market, it was a mixed bag of emotions as no one could predict what kind of tricks the chip maker had under its sleeves to keep those pesky devs away from their trade secrets. Well, as per a post made by Alexandre Courbot, the Japanese division of NVIDIA was making progress in helping the Nouveau project come afloat. For the unaware, the Nouveau project is essentially a group trying to create open source code to work with NVIDIA graphics hardware, which is the ultimate roadblock for most open source operating systems utilizing the Linux kernel (Android, Linux distros for PC, etc).

It seems that NVIDIA finally saw the benefit of contributing to the Open Source community, as they decided to share some of their work with the rest of the world by beginning testing and coding open source drivers for the K1 chipset. The work is indeed endorsed by NVIDIA, so rest assured that it is not a leak to be taken down or redacted. As stated, it is in very early stages of development and very few tests have been run. These will then expand into user space testing—if successful, of course. The road is a lengthy one, but certainly not impossible. And now that Nvidia is helping out, it is a far more tangible reality. The post was very well received by entire Open Source community—so much so, that even Linus himself gave NVIDIA yet another piece of his mind, but this time using a different finger. As the saying goes, you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs, and Linus’s original message seems to have broken just enough eggs for this wonderful, currently being cooked, omelette to finally happen.

Who knows? Maybe one day in the not-so-distant future, when the manufacturers remove their heads out of their posteriors and realize that without open source they would not exist today, they will start sharing what they know so that they can do what they once (likely) embarked out to do when their companies opened doors for the first time: Make the world a better place through education and sharing of knowledge through technology and innovation.

You can find more information in the original Google Plus post by Dr. Linus Torvalds.

[Thanks to OEM Relations Manager jerdog for the tip!]

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