14 DAY TRIAL // The Nouveau driver developers have just received a helping hand from Nvidia, which should result in much better free drivers in the future.
It's not all that common for a big company such as Nvidia to provide documentation for freeware drivers developed by the community.
It's even more unlikely for a developer from such a big company to post a message on the official mailing list announcing the beginning of a possible partnership. And yet it happed.
“NVIDIA is releasing public documentation on certain aspects of our GPUs, with the intent to address areas that impact the out-of-the-box usability of NVIDIA GPUs with Nouveau. We intend to provide more documentation over time, and guidance in additional areas as we are able,” stated Nvidia's Andy Ritger on the official mailing list.
This could mean a lot of things, and everything is open to speculation. Maybe it's because of the upcoming Steam OS, or maybe Nvidia wants to share the burden of development with the community.
In either case, the users will only have to gain from such a collaboration.