Hey. I worked there, and I'm no longer bound by their PR policy, so I can mention this. Also, know that the fact that I worked there doesn't make me privy to their high-level strategic decisions, this is a more look from the trenches kind of thing.

My impression I've developed in the years of working there is that Nvidia's relationship with opensource is... not intentional. They kinda suck at it because they genuinely don't know how to do it more than they want to make money out of it.

Here's an anecdotal "success story" which is also an illustration to how things might not work out well otherwise.

So, I was on the team that deals with server infrastructure. One day we get a new "feature" which was supposed to allow Slurm (the workload manager, a kind of software used to run "jobs", including eg. model training) to be deployed with distributed MySQL as a backend. The feature is all obviously written by a single developer with an enormous amount of "help" from AI. I was tasked with testing it.

Trying to figure out what it does... I realized that the "distributed" part of the feature was to be achieved by integrating with Oracle's MySQL by means of using MySQLShell (another proprietary Oracle's product). Until that point, by default, we integrated with MariaDB. Not only was it using Oracle's proprietary tool, the tool, actually, didn't support the "distributed" part of the "solution". It was pitched as the "first step on the way there".

So, I was able to push back on it, mentioning Galera, arguing that the "solution" doesn't solve the problem and will require from customers to change databases (even if they are mostly compatible... they never quite 100% compatible). And the misfeature was rolled back.

I made an effort to investigate how did we even get there, and turned out that whoever authored the "solution" had an experience of working with Oracle products, but never really tried the open-source ones. So, he didn't do a research. He just used what he knew.

Unfortunately, this is a rare win, where the evidence of disadvantages of using proprietary solution was huge and enough to turn the tide. But often it doesn't face any resistance because nobody is even aware of the problem.

If that's true, it may bode well for the future. The AI boom creates some strong incentives for Nvidia to develop an intentional strategy for software generally and FOSS specifically, and there's a chance that could influence the rest of the company in a very positive direction. Hopefully, what they learn by working with HF and having the value of their hardware products increasingly determined by their ability to run FOSS software stacks will backwash into the rest of the company, or at least make them much more aware of the problem at all levels.

I do think that they still might be a bit reticent to release fully open-source drivers, though, only because of the extent to which hardware design could be inferred from the driver source. OTOH, AI itself is making disassembling and reverse engineering binary code easier and easier, so there might not be much of a point to withholding the source in the near future.