I'm expecting this to be another Oracle/Sun acquisition, e.g. annihilates everything the old company's customers ever liked about them. So no, I don't think this FOSS contribution will continue. Nvidia is notoriously hostile to open source.
I've been very critical of Nvidia and this acquisition, but I don't think this is accurate. Nvidia as a company shows a lot of evidence of a company that does not deal well with community or intercompany collaboration. But I don't believe they're actively hostile to open source.
The reason Nvidia's main graphics driver is closed source is I think merely historical. Closed source drivers were the status quo for the longest time, and the development of Nvidia's driver is built around this. Right now the thing is probably filled to the brim with hacks, (third party) intellectual property, and near zero support for the Mesa standards/architecture that came into existence way late in the driver's life. AMD's driver would also likely still be closed source for similar reasons, were it not that they decided to invest a lot of money (and lost time) to give it a fundamental rewrite - which was necessitated because their closed source driver was much worse than Nvidia's was in the first place.
There's a lot of narrative around characterizing Nvidia as 'evil' and them being actively hostile against open source, but it's just a company with its own faults (maybe moreso than others, sure) and with its own history.
The incentives around having a mainline Linux driver keep on getting stronger, and I'm actually cautiously optimistic that Nvidia knows this and will consider making the investment to make such a driver. Especially if their commitment around Linux-on-ARM has to improve as a result of this acquisition.
Nvidia was the only provider of fully working OGL drivers for Linux and BSDs for decades, so this narrative is just pure FUD.
They're not "notoriously hostile" if they didn't choose to throw a wrench in their drivers and whole business just because Linux kernel people decided to trash the driver APIs one-sidedly. They're also not "hostile" because they refuse to be bullied by Linus' middle fingering into the solution that doesn't work for them.
The userspace vs kernelspace distinction is important here. Nvidia contributing userspace code with dependencies on their hardware and proprietary drivers is part of a lock-in strategy. Contributing open-source drivers would be a very different thing, and would undermine at least some of their product segmentation strategies.
I think the theory is that that's what OpenCL is, but for most people if you're building a dedicated cluster, you're buying Nvidia hardware anyway, and if you already are using the hardware for it, you might as well go native and get the best performance and library support.
Stuck in pure C, printf style debugging with graphical debuggers that never properly handled everything.
CUDA, polyglot GPGPU development environment, graphical debuggers that allow for single stepping and conditional breakpoints in GPGPU code, interoperability with graphical APIs.
OTOY just replaced their rendering code in Octane Render from Vulkan to CUDA (via Optix 7).
What's actually "open source" about what they have made themselves, as possibly opposed to modifying existing stuff? There's a significant effect of being proprietary in that people like me can't distribute packages using it for Fedora, Debian, SUSE, etc.
