I mean, it seems like Nvidia barely even cares about gamers in general anymore, let alone linux users.
If they’re pushing into enterprise servers, like for AI, those are almost guaranteed to be running on some form of linux. I guess companies are willing pay for support contracts so their use cases will probably work pretty well.
Companies don’t care about Free Software. They’re happy to exploit the community’s free labor, but they have no interest in expending the slightest bit of effort or inconvenience to give back to it, even if their actions hurt themselves in the long run.
That’s why they’d rather lock themselves into the proprietary ML ecosystem Nvidia is trying to build rather than support open-source drivers and standardized APIs like OpenCL.
They don’t care about free software in the same way that many others in the FOSS community do. They don’t believe all information should be free, or copyleft, but they will contribute significantly to an ecosystem if it results in software that is cheaper for them because they can spread the cost of maintenance and enhancement, and is not subject to exploitative contracts from vendor lock in.
A lot of the infrastructure I use at work is open source, some of it, like Chrome, is open source because the primary contributing company wants to use it to exert influence over the ecosystem, but other software, like PostGres, is maintained by a bunch of different for- and non-profit institutions because they hate oracle and want to make a cheaper to maintain relational database or sell services to companies using said cheaper relational database, but the latter is definitely kept in check by the former.
