DESPITE the popularity of NVIDIA chips, the company has had a contentious relationship with the open-source community. Linux developers were frustrated by NVIDIA’s refusal to provide code to develop open-source drivers for the OS. In a 2012 interview, Linus Torvalds described them as “the single worst company [we] ever worked with”.
Even criminals got in the game. In 2022, Ransomware gang Lapsus$ threatened to leak NVIDIA GPU data files unless they agreed to open-source its GPU drivers for all operating systems forever. NVIDIA declined. But in the same year, it did begin open-sourcing GPU kernel modules. This was done for the R515 driver for data center GPUs, using dual MIT and GPL licensing.