Free NVIDIA Fermi Cards To Open-Source Developers

“Prior to launching their next-generation graphics processors,
NVIDIA dropped their obfuscated open-source driver and have said
they will not provide any open-source support at all for their
GeForce GTX 400 “Fermi” series as they just recommended their
customers use the X.Org VESA driver until they can install the
official binary Linux driver. However, the community developers
working on the Nouveau driver project still plan to support the
GeForce GTX 470/480 graphics cards via clean-room reverse
engineering. Today their efforts might be helped thanks to a
hardware sponsorship.

“Many of the Nouveau developers are unpaid for their open-source
graphics driver work and as such they are often limited to
supporting the hardware they have access to or reverse-engineered
dumps. They have called out for donations and hardware in the past,
but now PathScale is approaching them with Fermi graphics cards in
hand.”

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