Huh? After joining up, broadcom produced the "brcmsmac" driver, which is now part of mainline, and modern broadcom devices typically work out of the box. Broadcom joining the Linux Foundation certainly had a lot of effect. It's just that these things take time. If nVidia makes the call that they are going to support OSS drivers today, it would likely take at least a year before anything percolated up to normal users.
I'm just saying that out of my own experience.
I found a bug in their driver with kernel 2.6.37 and I wrote a patch and sent them. The answer I got was:
"Our internal version works properly with 2.6.37 but we haven't had enough complaints to make releasing this patch necessary" (ok, those weren't the exact words but that was the meaning of it).
So I learned not to expect much of them.
To get more people running heavy number-crunching algorithms on their monster graphic cards? Like CUDA stuff. AFAIK most these applications are on Linux platforms.
I think that more and more software is becoming a means to sell your hardware. I would assume that Nvidia wants to utilize as much of the community as possible to push the next wave of Linux based mobile devices. They aren't really making money off the software anyway, so I doubt it would hurt them to open-source that and it can help them to push their products on more linux based devices.
They get to put nice empty PR statements as they are part of the Linux foundation. To the common man on the street it means the same as they are now fully supporting Linux.
I was fooled into thinking this was something significant. Hopefully, they'll prove us all wrong and we'll start to see some meaningful contributions headed our way even though it's not what the past has shown. Or maybe I can accept this title as link bait and move along.
"Among the many Linux Foundation members are VIA (their open-source strategy failed and really haven't been doing anything), AMD (they're still happy with their Catalyst binary blob while the open-source support is still lagging), Adobe (they abandoned Flash Player for Linux and most of their software is not available natively under Linux), Oracle (enough said with their share of controversies in various open-source communities), and a host of mobile-focused firms like ARM / Qualcomm / Samsung that don't ship full open-source graphics drivers for Linux (the best case to date for them has been open-source kernel drivers with closed-up user-space components, some of which are being reverse-engineered). "
(for those that didn't get it, I meant "nothing at all")