Closed and Open Source are going to exist side by side for a long time, probably forever. What that means is that "integration" and "interoperability" are the major issues we face between these two camps, not "who will win". So this raises the question of what does good integration mean?
Nvidia is what I consider to be an example of good integration between Closed and Open Source.
Nvidia makes closed source video drivers which are availble for all of the major Operating Systems such as Microsoft Windows, Apple, and for the open source Xorg Window System used by the majority of Linux distributions.
Obviously Nvidia works hard to make sure that their drivers work properly and integrate well with Xorg but what makes Nvidia such a good example of integration is that they also contribute code directly to the Xorg project itself.
If you take a look at this list you will see how Nvidia places among the rest of the contributors for the most recent 1.9 release of Xorg.
11th place for "Top changeset contributors by employer" with 8 changesets (1.6% of total)
11th place for "Top lines changed by employer" with 507 lines changed (0.8% of total)
11th place for "Employers with the most signoffs" with 8 signoffs (1.3% of total)
Now obviously the changes which Nvidia has contributed to Xorg all have to do with making their closed source Nvidia driver work better with the Xorg system it runs on, but regardless of that it is great to see them taking part in the process and contributing code directly to an existing OSS project.
One might wonder how many patches Nvidia contributes to Apple, or Microsoft Windows. I would hazard to guess none.
Kudos to Nvidia for being a good player with regards to OSS even though their main products are not open source.
Everybody wins when closed source software developers take a proactive approach to the existing OSS ecosystem.
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