What a nice way to ruin it for everyone, these leakers are acting against our best interest by doing this. Starting from Friday, every single FOSS GPU driver project will have to prepare for legal actions, they will also need to be able to spot illegal code before it’s even committed and yet they’re not allowed to see Nvidia code, they’re effectively in a dead end. Who the heck would want to be in a position like this? they have to pray no one will be insolent enough to copy or derive code from there, we all know some people will do it anyway so it’s a lost battle. This is not the best thing to happen to open-source software ever, if they cared about FOSS they will contribute to Nouveau. this also applies to ALL FOSS GPU drivers, not just Nvidia. How are they supposed to spot the illegal code in their commits if they can not examine the Nvidia code to compare against the code in the commits? As far as I’m concerned, they are in a deep mess now. Nvidia has pushed proprietary drivers at every chance and I’d see that change.
When we see that their competitors notably AMD (but even Intel who has done their share of shitty stuff still has FOSS GPU drivers and is planning to make XeSS an open spec etc) having viable 3D performance FOSS drivers on Linux with a unified codebase ( think they had a proprietary/binary blob addon at one point or another but it was more like a module rather than an entirely different driver – is it still the case now that there’s either more features or slightly better performance with the binary add-on for AMD, but you can basically get 90% fully FOSS?). Meanwhile, Nvidia has tried to lock everything down from software to firmware to hardware – that is not good in the long run. There are all sorts of garbage from their binary blob drivers on both sides, to NVEnc, to DLSS, to LHR locks, the necessity to use proprietary binary drivers on Linux to get any sort of performance, and other garbage out there all need to go. Having a working open-source driver on Linux would be very good, Nvidia doing this would not be the end of the world, this would really help out with GPU sales, even with the scalpers buying up cards left right and centre, they still sell. So I think this would be a good thing. Instead of tainting the kernel with a binary blob as we do now. Plenty of computer users use Linux and Nvidia and would appreciate a driver that comes with the kernel and can work with their GPU properly. Nouveau is not a proper solution, I have had issues with it.