The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting Linux has announced that four companies are joining the organization: Fluendo, Lineo Solutions, Mocana, and NVIDIA. The big news here is that NVIDIA, the major graphic chip original equipment manufacturer (OEM), is finally officially supporting Linux.
Now that NVIDIA is a member of the Linux Foundation, all three of the major graphic chip designers–AMD Graphics Technologies (formerly ATI) and Intel–are backing Linux. NVIDIA, best known for its GeForce chipsets, has long had an uncomfortable relationship with Linux.
While NVIDIA has long shipped Linux graphic drivers and has kept its Linux drivers up-to-date, the drivers for their graphic processors have always used proprietary binary blobs. This meant free-software users couldn’t use the drivers and open-source developers couldn’t work on them to improve them.