SiliconNews
12 HN mentions · mentioned in 11 months, 2012–2026
0:41 · 1.9M views · Jun 17, 2012
A one-minute clip of Linus Torvalds telling Nvidia "fuck you" over its lack of support for Linux and open source. It is taken from a Q&A session.
Cited whenever Nvidia's relationship with open-source and Linux drivers comes up.
12 comments from Hacker News
> The claim that nvidia is bad at open source because it does not open source its Linux driver is also quite wrong [...] Hey! Wait a second, there. Nvidia isn't bad because it has a properietary Linux driver. Nvidia is bad because it actively undermines open-source. Quoting Linus Torvalds (2012) [0]: > I'm also happy to very publicly point out that Nvidia has been one of the worst trouble spots we've had with hardware manufacturers, and that is really sad because then Nvidia tries to sell chips - a lot of chips - into the Android Market. Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with. > [Lifts middle finger] So Nvidia, fuck you. Nvidia managed to push some PR blurbs about how it was improving the open-source driver in 2014, but six years later, Nouveau is still crap compared to their proprietary driver [1]. Drew DeVault, on Nvidia support in Sway [2]: > Nvidia, on the other hand, have been fucking assholes and have treated Linux like utter shit for our entire relationship. About a year ago they announced “Wayland support” for their proprietary driver. This included KMS and DRM support (years late, I might add), but not GBM support. They shipped something called EGLStreams instead, a concept that had been discussed and shot down by the Linux graphics development community before. They did this because it makes it easier for them to keep their driver proprietary without having work with Linux developers on it. Without GBM, Nvidia does not support Wayland, and th
Exactly. They're arguing the combined work clause, which would automatically rule out all binary-only modules, such as nvidia.ko. Most previous arguments about zfs.ko were about the derived work clause, which is much more grey. I belive that nvidia.ko would be more likely to be ruled a derived work than ZFS.ko, but that's hard to tell. It does seem silly to argue about ZFS in this context. ZFS is open source and much less offensive to kernel developers than nvidia.ko.[1] If nvidia.ko is fine, then so is zfs.ko. If nvidia.ko isn't fine, zfs.ko may or may not be fine. Ubuntu has been shipping nvidia.ko for years. 1: this video
The economic incentive is simple: open-sourcing the driver will allow an open-source API to interact with the hardware, allowing AMD/other competitors to support the same API. So instead of competing at the silicon level, Nvidia chooses to set up unnecessary barriers to entry at massive cost to developers/users. Like Torvalds says [1]: Fuck You, Nvidia. [1]: this video
Without any conflict, uh? this video > Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with. > - Linus Kernel devs are antagonizing the only two GPU makers that matters. Besides the kernel, there has been some flame going between NVIDIA and Wayland devs too. Open source devs are immature men who do not understand the word compromise.
Yes they're completely orthogonal. Linus (seemingly) doesn't care about a person's race, creed, gender, or sexual preference. He cares that they are breaking Linux ( [LINK] ), spreading misinformation about Linux ( [LINK] ), releasing software that breaks Linux (GCC 4.9.0), or being generally, and consistantly anti open-source ( this video )