With the R515 driver, NVIDIA released a set of Linux GPU kernel modules in May 2022 as open source with dual GPL and MIT licensing. The initial release targeted datacenter compute GPUs…
I doubt very much it’s about whether they are allowed too or not. They’re the ones at the top of the hardware supply chain, designing their own chips and having them fabricated. It’s them telling other companies, like Gigabyte and EVGA, what they are allowed or not allowed to do.
Nvidia also buys and licenses code from other companies. These days they’re on top of the chain, but they used to be a lot smaller. Maybe they rewrote their drivers to remove the external code, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they still have old external code in their drivers.
AMD tried to open their source code for a display technique (VRR I think? Not sure what it was) but was prevented from doing so by the standards authority, presumably because they used licensed reference code. I don’t think this applies to the older 10xx series of cards, but these factors are difficult to work around.
Hmdi 2.1 and the hdmi consortium prevented them from releasing code. It wasn’t even proprietary, just based on a licensed implementation from what I understood.
I doubt very much it’s about whether they are allowed too or not. They’re the ones at the top of the hardware supply chain, designing their own chips and having them fabricated. It’s them telling other companies, like Gigabyte and EVGA, what they are allowed or not allowed to do.
Nvidia also buys and licenses code from other companies. These days they’re on top of the chain, but they used to be a lot smaller. Maybe they rewrote their drivers to remove the external code, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they still have old external code in their drivers.
AMD tried to open their source code for a display technique (VRR I think? Not sure what it was) but was prevented from doing so by the standards authority, presumably because they used licensed reference code. I don’t think this applies to the older 10xx series of cards, but these factors are difficult to work around.
Hmdi 2.1 and the hdmi consortium prevented them from releasing code. It wasn’t even proprietary, just based on a licensed implementation from what I understood.