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by exDM69 5115 days ago
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.
2 comments
chromatic 5115 days ago
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?

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Orva 5114 days ago
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.

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chromatic 5113 days ago
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.

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excuse-me 5114 days ago
How exactly do you NDA an opensource driver?
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pm90 5115 days ago
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)
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