So, is this a good thing or a bad thing?
I’m not sure what is more surprising that he is at the green giant or that he’s able to continue working on the Nouveau driver in an official capacity. Ben Skeggs has been involved with the Nouveau project for more than a decade.
I don’t trust them, there has to be a catch.
The solution is simple.
Fork the code and maintain your own fork.
… or …
You could say thank you and enjoy the fact that a person is being paid to write and maintain open source software.
If it all goes to shit, you can still fork the code.
That really depends on if NVIDIA pulls some nonsense and makes the driver somehow worse.
I’m hopeful, just a bit skeptical due to the decisions they’ve made in the past.
Nvidia has been slowly trying to open a little over the years; first GBM support in the proprietary driver then the open OOT module and finally GSP firmwares for the kernel; allowing an OSS kernel module to exist.
The OSS graphics community has obviously shown that it doesn’t want Nvidia’s open module (which is tied to the proprietary driver anyways) and would rather build out its own OSS drivers atop an adapted Nouveau/NOVA. Perhaps Nvidia finally realised this?
I’m sceptical too but for now this appears to be an actually good move from Nvidia?
Hopefully? I’m optimistic, but skeptical. I hope the dev gets actual information about the product that they can legally use to improve FOSS NVIDIA drivers.
