Linux developers demand open drivers, docs and development processes, NVIDIA refuses to open their drivers, arguing that the technical quality is not a problem, and that the driver contains intellectual property they wish to protect. ATI/AMD has shown the intellectual property argument is at least not universally applicable to graphics hardware. Let's also clear up a misconception about the technical quality of closed NVIDIA drivers.

They have even criticized Nvidia specifically for not releasing free drivers. Nvidia responded.

According to Nvidia, until the problem is resolved, Linux users should revert to 190.53 web release or the 195.30 public beta. They are going to remove the 195.36.08 and 195.36.03 drivers from NVIDIA's FTP site.

Currently, GNU/Linux users with Nvidia graphics cards have two choices: Either use the proprietary drivers and violate their free software principles, or use the free nv driver and do without 3-D acceleration. The Nouveau project is working to overcome this dilemma by producing its own set of fully functional free Nvidia drivers.

In time for the X.Org 7.5 release (whenever that may come), David Airlie has put out new driver releases for nineteen of the X.Org video drivers. These aren't updates to the mainline ATI/AMD, Intel, or even NVIDIA drivers, but some of the drivers for less common graphics hardware.

On May 28th, 2008, NVidia decided to please the Linux world and launched version 173.14.05 of their graphics drivers, which brought preliminary support for X.org Server 1.5 (used in bleeding-edge distributions, such as Fedora 9). A few days ago, they decided to make the Linux users happy again, by releasing yet another bugfix version of their graphics drivers, Nvidia 173.14.09.

One month ago Nvidia released their 180.22 video drivers for Linux OSes, which brought initial support for Linux kernel 2.6.28. Last night (February 11th) Nvidia proudly presented yet another improved version of their proprietary video driver for the Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris open source operating systems.

The latest NVIDIA drivers are 177 in the repos. This causes a bug with the new Intrepid Kernel causing the window title bars on some systems to draw incorrectly. It tends to be an intermittent problem. This is a temporary fix using the NVIDIA 180.08 beta drivers.

NVIDIA's open-source Linux efforts as it concerns their GPU support have historically been minimal. The xf86-video-nv driver has been around that provides very basic 2D acceleration and a crippled set of features besides that (no proper RandR 1.2/1.3, KMS, power management, etc) while the code has also been obfuscated to try to protect their intellectual property.