Nvidia has turned down requests for an Open Source graphics driver.
"Nvidia supports Linux, as well as the Linux community and has long been praised for the quality of the Nvidia Linux driver. Nvidia's fully featured Linux graphics driver is provided as binary-only because it contains intellectual property Nvidia wishes to protect, both in hardware and in software," was the graphics card vendor's response to the kernel developers' petition against closed source drivers.
The kernel developers stated that closed source drivers harmed the Linux ecosystem. Nvidia disagrees, stating that it has its own kernel development team. Nvidia does not expect other kernel developers to help out with debugging Nvidia's kernel modules. On top of this, the kernel interface layer for the closed driver is structured to allow free access to the Linux specific code it contains.
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