I was reading the front page blurbs on Maximum PC earlier and happened upon a video clip of Linus Torvalds expressing how he really feels about Nvidia. I know that the FOSS community has been pushing for ATI/AMD & Nvidia to open source their drivers, or at least components thereof, for quite some time, to little avail. That being said, I would like to know a bit more of the background behind Linus' apparent deep seeded hatred toward the green team. I have always found Nvidia GPU hardware to play very nice with various Linux distros going back to LM8. The hand full of decent games available for Tux have always played nicely and VDPAU is a great feature to be able to access. So far as I know, Nvidia's hardware is the only type to be able to utilize acceleration for multimedia content played from within Linux.  It is largely for this very reason that I never consider AMD's GPU models when building my machines. I guess I'm trying to say that I don't quite get the level of animosity being expressed.
 
I would provide a link, however the content of the article and source video could be considered coarse and obscene by the folks here at the EVGA forums. But anyways, check out Maximum PC's site and you can't miss it.

In my opinion, NVIDIA has always had the best graphics drivers for Linux.
 
I run a 560Ti on a heavily customized install of Linuxmint.
 

open source drivers please

Binary blobs and tainted kernels were rememered by me at the kernel since 2004 my first experience with a conexant softmodem who runs at 14400 bauds if you want the 56k you must pay the license for the fully code :(.
The open source nvidia nouveau driver is good compared with the nvidia counterpart and the legal lot of paper signing of NDA about some chipsets have motivated to the community to do some reverse engineering and provide most of the time and finally a good driver code (OpenBSD reverse-engineered Atheros HAL).
Linus claimed things that most of the community thinks support from vendor part and the horrible NDA that the devs need to sign if they want access to the specs to write some code for be included at the kernel.
We the user linux community suffered a lot of things like buy a new laptop install linux and saw that some chips things like wifi/nic/card reader or even events like acpi are not supported :(

fredbsd

I really don't give a flip what Linus thinks/says about drivers.  I respect him, but don't much care for grandstanding.

IMHO, Nvidia does us a great service w/ their *nix support (OSS or not).  Others may disagree (I have had numerous 'discussions' with Mr. Stallman long ago about all this crap) and that is perfectly fine.  My take is simple: just make it work.  Don't care if I get the source or not.

Now, having said that, I am a big advocate of opening up code.  But, that is Nvidia's prerogative.  I am thankful they support my OS.  More than I can say for most hardware vendors.

I tend to agree and Nvidia does do a nice job of providing drivers for a diverse set of OSs. 

You'll find that many open source activists are all-in on their development philosophies. There are no shades of gray or flexibility to be had. It's their development ecology that they played a key part in and they feel betrayed by anything that doesn't align with their beliefs and philosophies. Linus is a polarizing figure when it comes to open source. I don't subscribe to his academic naivety of software licensing, but it doesn't surprise me any. He is a walking and talking example of open source advocacy. NVIDIA is a commercial entity that has a vested interest in keeping their IP close at hand and a tight control over it in the process. Those two philosophies are more at odds with each other than not. That doesn't make NVIDIA implementation on Linux bad at all though.