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Nvidia becomes Linux Foundation member, joins AMD and Intel
In a press release published on Wednesday, the Linux Foundation announced another major industry player has joined their cause: Nvidia. This means the iconic graphics chipmaker has joined the likes of Intel and AMD as members of the organization.
The Linux Foundation is a non-profit consortium dedicated to improving Linux by supporting and protecting its members while leveraging their technical expertise.
For the Linux world, this could be some very good news. Open source drivers are important to Linux for reasons of practice and principle. This may be the first step leading to Nvidia finally introducing an official open source alternative to its traditionally proprietary driver sets.
So far, Nvidia has proved it has a tin ear when it comes to open source. The company has been unwilling to contribute to projects like Nouveau, which have had to actually reverse engineer Nvidia drivers to provide an open source alternative.
Linux fans shouldn't hold their breath just yet though -- no details were given about how Nvidia will participate, contribute or what their intents may be as a foundation member. Typically though, those who join the Linux Foundation do so to participate.
A handful of other companies also joined the Linux Foundation as well, including Fluendo, Lineo Solutions and Mocana.
Fluendo is a multimedia software developer who specializes in leveraging Gstreamer-based solutions, an open source multi-media framework to which the company actively contributes. Lineo is an embedded systems developer who has relied on Linux for nearly 20 years and Mocana is a security platform developer.
The Linux Foundation contains many other notable partners, including Google, Fujitsu, IBM and Broadcom.
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User Comments: 12
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psycros said:
I've never understood what possible reasoning a company could have for <i>not</i> releasing drivers for every widely used OS. While its market share in the US is miniscule, its been growing steadily for ages. Outside the sphere of American domination, Linux is used quite a bit and its popularity is growing rapidly. With the impending disaster that is Windows 8 looming large, users who aren't ready to buy an overpriced Apple machine may start giving Linux a much more serious look.
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Your giving Windows users way to much credit. They will not change, they will blindly follow where ever Microsoft leads them. They are just sheep to be sheered. Actually, most of them just buy what a PC off the shelf and do not know how to install an OS if it bit them on their butt.
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Tekkaraiden said:
psycros said:I've never understood what possible reasoning a company could have for <i>not</i> releasing drivers for every widely used OS. While its market share in the US is miniscule, its been growing steadily for ages. Outside the sphere of American domination, Linux is used quite a bit and its popularity is growing rapidly. With the impending disaster that is Windows 8 looming large, users who aren't ready to buy an overpriced Apple machine may start giving Linux a much more serious look.
I always thought Ati/Amd and Nvidia always supplied Linux drivers, they just were not open source.
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Guest said:
Your giving Windows users way to much credit. They will not change, they will blindly follow where ever Microsoft leads them. They are just sheep to be sheered. Actually, most of them just buy what a PC off the shelf and do not know how to install an OS if it bit them on their butt.
I take offense at that generalization. I use Windows for various reasons: school, work, I play quite a few games and don't feel like using WINE, etc. Do I buy PCs off the shelf? Well technically its not a shelf, but it was on a shelf at one point, but u get my point. But yes I do, and I buy them that way when they are on sale at a cheap enough price that its actually cheaper to buy it prebuilt than to build it myself. So I meet both your stereotypes and yet I can still install an OS (not really a good reference seeing as how you basically put a disc in, change boot order, and click a few options unless you have an answer file). Most people use Windows because its a solid OS, mostly, that is much, much cheaper than the Apple alternative. More people don't use Linux because not many people outside the group that is truly interested in, or work with, computers know about Linux besides that its another OS.
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I've used a few versions of linux over the years, but regardless, no OS is stronger than whatever the latest version of Windows is.
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Qrox said:
I've used 3 versions of Linux over the last few years, and would not recommend it to anyone (unless I wanted them to suffer).
The only reason I've worked on them is for University purposes and its really a crap system. The latest version we have at our university is worse that windows 98.
Other than the OS being free, I really don't know why people use Linux.
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Qrox said:
I've used 3 versions of Linux over the last few years, and would not recommend it to anyone (unless I wanted them to suffer).
The only reason I've worked on them is for University purposes and its really a crap system. The latest version we have at our university is worse that windows 98.
Other than the OS being free, I really don't know why people use Linux.
That's true, Linux just sucks, it is the worst. I would prefer Windows 8 than Linux although I didn't like Windows 8, but surely it is much better than Linux.
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bielius said:
I don't think linux may be easy to use for an average windows user, but for the hackers, crackers etc it is better suited. f.ex. It is much easier to crack a WEP password using linux than windows.
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Geez, does there only have to be one right answer for everyone? Each OS has advantages and disadvantages. Each user uses certian applications for whatever purpose. Each person is allowed to choose an OS or anything else for whatever reason they like. Now if you want to talk on a technical side the strengths and weaknesses of a system in an intelligent way please do so.
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Windows has such a large share of the world o/s market, it's "basic infrastructure" now. So the fact that MS continues to expand and improve it -a thankless task for them- is kind of impressive.
Win 8 Preview is terrific and free to try for a year. It makes Win 7 seem old and slow.
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Thank you NVIDIA .
We Love You
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I;ve use linux for work, i'd have to say its crap, support is crap, people who support is crap, at least windows, people are interestings not so crap, and support at least is only slightly crap.
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