I think his point is that if the nvidia company felt threatened by Linux, then they would immediately stop producing for Linux. In which case the Linux ecosystem would shrink, and the platform would become less useful.

Would this actually happen? Would it effect Linuxes popularity? That's harder to predict.

They're already not producing for Linux, though; they're producing for themselves and flouting the GPL to expand their market.

Are they really flouting the GPL though? I think you could make a better case that SteamOS is, with an integrated Nvidia driver.

What makes this different IMO from VMWare is that they are not creating a work that exists purely b/c of Linux, instead they a making a piece of software that allows their hardware to work with a Linux based machine.

I think those are two very different types GPL violation. One really does flout the GPL and exploit Linux kernel devs, the other I think is generally viewed as an enhancement to Linux, thus less interest in fighting it.

They're flouting the GPL in the sense that they produced a binary-only driver enabled by a compatibility layer released under GPL that, in my uninformed opinion, probably violates the GPL. It still doesn't do me any good, though; I'm on my second laptop with Optimus graphics, and they're just not going to make their hardware work on this machine when it's not running Windows. Fortunately, I only need 3D acceleration when I'm gaming, and the machine came with a Windows license, so dual-booting is an option for me.

Leaving aside the fact that this isn't really settled legal theory...

Linux would be hurt more by nVidia's absence than nVidia would be hurt by Linux's absence.

Linux could disappear tomorrow, and there are plenty of free Unix-like alternatives that easily fill the void.

If nVidia disappeared tomorrow, there are lots of Linux contracts that would simply stop (and most likely switch to Windows).

Now, you can argue ideologically, but part of the reason why Linux is popular stems from the fact that Linus was more pragmatic about licensing rather than RMS' dogmatism.

If you want to see what a world with a strictly enforced GPL without modules looks like, look at the device support for OpenBSD. A lot of Linux folks would be very upset being limited to that set of peripherals.

> Linux would be hurt more by nVidia's absence than nVidia would be hurt by Linux's absence.

Maybe for the desktop, but not overall: Nvidia is heavily pushing supercomputing/machine learning and it can't afford to ignore Linux in this space (since Linux dominates).

If Nvidia were to abandon Linux, they would be gifting AMD a free come-back opportunity.

What if Nvidia provided good ⋆BSD drivers? According to the answers from Greg Lindahl and Eugene Miya on Quora to the question "Why is the OS landscape of Supercomputers dominated by Linux instead of BSD?" [1] the Linux dominance is largely an historical oddity rather than due to some inherent superiority of Linux.

If for some reason supercomputer builders could no longer use the best GPUs in supercomputers, would they stick with Linux or would they follow the hardware and switch to a ⋆BSD on the compute nodes?

[1] http://qr.ae/RUortF

>If for some reason supercomputer builders could no longer use the best GPUs in supercomputers, would they stick with Linux or would they follow the hardware and switch to a ⋆BSD on the compute nodes?

I have no idea what the answer would be, but my guess is it would hinge on 1) AMDs reaction, and the performance hit (if any) of switching to AMD GPUs on Linux and 2) the performance hit (if any) of switching the OS to *BSD

NVIDIA does produces drivers for FreeBSD[1]. I don't know if they're considered "good" or not, but they definitely aim to have the same features and quality as on Linux.

[1] http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

I think you vastly underestimate how far those guys would go to eek out every last bit of practical performance.

Going with second rate option simply doesnt work when you're spending hundreds of millions per machine on the high end.

I mean do you really think it told really be easier to port a thousand heavily optimized applications/libs CUDA to OpenCL than the handfull of librsties that dont alrady work with BSD from Linux?!