> Nvidia is notoriously hostile to open source. I've been very critical of Nvidia and this acquisition, but I don't think this is accurate. Nvidia as a company

> Nvidia is notoriously hostile to open source. I've been very critical of Nvidia and this acquisition, but I don't think this is accurate. Nvidia as a company shows a lot of evidence of a company that does not deal well with community or intercompany collaboration. But I don't believe they're actively hostile to open source. The reason Nvidia's main graphics driver is closed source is I think merely historical. Closed source drivers were the status quo for the longest time, and the development of Nvidia's driver is built around this. Right now the thing is probably filled to the brim with hacks, (third party) intellectual property, and near zero support for the Mesa standards/architecture that came into existence way late in the driver's life. AMD's driver would also likely still be closed source for similar reasons, were it not that they decided to invest a lot of money (and lost time) to give it a fundamental rewrite - which was necessitated because their closed source driver was much worse than Nvidia's was in the first place. There's a lot of narrative around characterizing Nvidia as 'evil' and them being actively hostile against open source, but it's just a company with its own faults (maybe moreso than others, sure) and with its own history. The incentives around having a mainline Linux driver keep on getting stronger, and I'm actually cautiously optimistic that Nvidia knows this and will consider making the investment to make such a driver. Especially if their commitment around Linux-on-ARM has to improve as a result of this acquisition.