Too bad this comes from the worst company to the open source. I wish something other than CUDA and NVIDIA dominated modern AI industry.
Last time I checked, Nvidia has quite a bit of open source software on GitHub.
Open sourcing something that you have developed and paid for(!) should always be at the discretion of those who did so.
Did it send out C&D orders?
How can it actively resist when it has released at least some useful pieces of information?
But as you admit: not only did they not actively resist, they actively helped out by providing something that they were under no obligation to provide.
I don't think you have a clear understanding of what "the worst" and "actively" means.
It's fine to be disappointed with a company deciding not to support open source in a way you'd like. But let's not go overboard with hyperbole? Have you ever complained about Microsoft not open sourcing the Office suite? About Oracle not open sourcing their crown jewels? About Apple not open sourcing iOS? About Broadcom not open sourcing the RPi drivers? And a million other companies, large and small, not open sourcing their money making products?
And yet, in the world we live in, I have a hard time faulting a corporation for not giving away their core products for free.
So just look at their competitors. AMD and Intel both have many dedicated employees directly committing into Mesa. There are two open source implementations of Vulkan for Radeon GPUs, ffs. AMD is working on Radeon Open Compute to get all the code written against CUDA to work anywhere. There is no proprietary Linux driver for Intel GPUs. BTW even Broadcom and Qualcomm are supporting Mesa now. While nvidia uh.. was interested in nouveau on Tegra a little bit but is completely against nouveau on desktop.
And Nvidia has decided that it's not in their best interest to give away that IP for free. If they believe that their driver has secret sauce that gives then an competitive advantage, then that's entirely their prerogative.
> AMD is working on Radeon Open Compute to get all the code written against CUDA to work anywhere.
If you were in a position where your proprietary software fueled 90%+ of a highly profitable industry, would you open source it just for the good of humanity?
Of course AMD is trying to copy that and open source it: they don't have 90%+ market share to lose. It doesn't cost them anything to do so.