NVIDIA drivers are now open source, but not on Windows

The green brand has just made a political gesture, and it’s NVIDIA has made its drivers open source. Something that may look good at first glance. Reality? This is a totally political decision on the part of Jen Hsun Huang and aimed at a specific market. What led you to make this decision?

Open source consists of publishing the same source of a program so that knowledgeable third parties can make improvements, optimizati ons and add new elements. It should not be confused with free software, even if the latter is based on the source code available for a few weeks. Well, after its servers were attacked a few weeks ago, NVIDIA strategically anticipated potential issues and made an unprecedented move. Make your graphics drivers open source! However, this is not the case with its PC graphics cards.

Thus, the source code of its graphics drivers has been circulating on the net for some time now and is available to everyone. For the average user who uses their graphics card to play games, it’s worth nothing. However, there is a niche market that has the ability and knowledge to create their own pilots.

Why did NVIDIA make its drivers open source?

The market where Linux is strongest is in high performance computing, where Windows is not often used. The reason is that it is a world that comes from Unix systems in universities in the 1980s, where powerful servers and workstations for scientific development used the AT&T operating system. Its natural successor? Linux which has inherited a good part of the applications and has enough flexibility due to its open source nature for highly specialized solutions.

It’s no secret that one of the most important markets for Jen Hsun’s business is this one. For what open source NVIDIA drivers are only for Linux and especially for your graphics cards for servers and data centers

. That is, graphics cards for games and professionals are completely excluded. However, the catch on NVIDIA’s part is that they will only be available for the different variants of the A100 and for the new H100. All other, and therefore older, GPUs will need to continue using the older closed-source drivers. The so-called Open Kernel Modules are the basis of this NVIDIA movement and, as we said, it is the basic code to more easily integrate graphics drivers into the most used Linux distributions.

Currently, the developers of the most used distributions already have a close collaboration: Ubuntu, SUSE and Red Hat. With this decision, the ball in terms of driver development passes to the creators of the distros. When will the jump take place? well in the R515 version NVIDIA drivers for Linux.