[tikhonj]

I don't think that this would have been the right venue to go into an in-depth rant about Nvidia's lack of cooperation. That's certainly not what the audience was looking for and probably not what Linus wanted to go into; moreover, I doubt anybody from Nvidia was there or would even have heard the talk.

The last point is somewhat ironic: if Linus had been reasonable and talked about Nvidia at length, Nvidia would probably not have noticed the talk; since Linus decided to be curt, the talk got onto HN and people from Nvidia have no doubt noticed it.

Besides, whatever you think about it, Linus's approach was indubitably effective. We are, after all, talking about the issue right now!

[jofer]

Actually, there at least one Nvidia employee in the room. Have a look at the last question (asked by an Nvidia employee).

[exDM69]

There were several Nvidia employees in the room, I wasn't one of them because I missed the sign-up for the event. But my co-workers were there and they got the message, and I hope the message propagates upwards to the people who make the big decisions on this.

But Linus' message was a bit disheartening. Most of our crew would really like to open source everything we write. But then there's the fact that our code would reveal the secrets of our hardware. And the fact that Nvidia is a hardware company with a strong Windows background, so open source software is quite a strange thing in comparison. It kinda feels like being between a rock and a hard place.

When it comes to mobile software, Nvidia has been doing more open source work and upstreaming quite a lot of our changes. A lot of work has been done in the kernel internals and arm stuff. Not a lot of customer facing stuff but very valuable work if you're trying to build ARM-based system on chips.

[chromatic]

But then there's the fact that our code would reveal the secrets of our hardware.

To whom? Certainly not your competitors.

Also what's wrong with releasing specs under NDA?

[Orva]

No sane open source driver developer would agree to NDA in order to write driver. You wouldn't be able to contribute any other driver project (in that specialty area, which might be vast) until your NDA ends.

And of course, device driver would tell people all the secrets that NDA forbids you to disclose.

[chromatic]

No sane open source driver developer would agree to NDA in order to write driver.

Many Linux kernel developers have offered to sign NDAs with Nvidia and many other companies.

And of course, device driver would tell people all the secrets that NDA forbids you to disclose.

How? It's easy to obfuscate certain details of driver code. Think of magic constants, for example.

[excuse-me]

How exactly do you NDA an opensource driver?

[pm90]

you should really post this as a reply to the link. Not many will see this after its been nested all this way down (at the moment)

[sho_hn]

Time index for the lazy?

[flabbergasted]

http://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=1h28s

[jofer]

Linking to a specific time over 1 hour isn't working correctly for some reason, for whatever it's worth. (Or at least it hasn't been for me, anyway...)

Nevermind, we were both just doing it wrong. This should work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA#t=1h28s

[karlshea]

The time link thing doesn't seem to be working for me, but it's at 1h29s