Nvidia Is Joining The Linux Foundation

Huh? After joining up, broadcom produced the "brcmsmac" driver, which is now part of mainline, and modern broadcom devices typically work out of the box. Broadcom joining the Linux Foundation certainly had a lot of effect. It's just that these things take time. If nVidia makes the call that they are going to support OSS drivers today, it would likely take at least a year before anything percolated up to normal users.

Well based on the experience of when Adobe joined the Foundation, I'd say the impact is going to be pretty much zero.

Support for the few pieces of linux software that they used to make (prior to joining the Foundation) has now stopped/ gradually being wound down.

I think that more and more software is becoming a means to sell your hardware. I would assume that Nvidia wants to utilize as much of the community as possible to push the next wave of Linux based mobile devices. They aren't really making money off the software anyway, so I doubt it would hurt them to open-source that and it can help them to push their products on more linux based devices.

Credibility when the time comes to woo manufacturers to build Linux-based products with their hardware?

Also: Canonical.

They get to put nice empty PR statements as they are part of the Linux foundation. To the common man on the street it means the same as they are now fully supporting Linux.

To get more people running heavy number-crunching algorithms on their monster graphic cards? Like CUDA stuff. AFAIK most these applications are on Linux platforms.

Supporting Wayland?

I'd say its negligent. From the article:

"Among the many Linux Foundation members are VIA (their open-source strategy failed and really haven't been doing anything), AMD (they're still happy with their Catalyst binary blob while the open-source support is still lagging), Adobe (they abandoned Flash Player for Linux and most of their software is not available natively under Linux), Oracle (enough said with their share of controversies in various open-source communities), and a host of mobile-focused firms like ARM / Qualcomm / Samsung that don't ship full open-source graphics drivers for Linux (the best case to date for them has been open-source kernel drivers with closed-up user-space components, some of which are being reverse-engineered). "