> There is also the problem of needing huge amounts of capital, where most of this work can only be done by exceedingly well funded groups with deep ties to hardware divisions in question. The future of hardware innovation comes from billion dollar companies, because only they can sustain it, not plucky engineers. Sure, for us, CUDA being open source would be awesome. But you don't really need open source drivers when you're working directly with the vendor on your requirements and you pay them millions for support and you just use Linux for everything.
I think the exact same argument could be made for mainframes and microcomputers before we standardized on x86. RISC architectures were cheaper and faster in the eighties and nineties than CISC, but x86 cleaned up because it was standard and had an ecosystem. NVidia is limiting its ecosystem to everyone who needs HPC, where the ecosystem should be everyone (no qualifier). All computers could benefit from a massively parallel MIMD co-processor.
> But what they also understand is that their software stack is a differentiator for them, because it actually works (the competitors don't) and it makes them money to keep it that way.
And I think Symbian made the same argument before being steamrolled by iOS and Android. And I've seen the same argument made by business folks at several businesses I've worked at.
By the way, "open" doesn't mean it's not okay to keep some pieces proprietary. NVidia can keep their differentiator by keeping key algorithms proprietary, while making the architecture open, and developing a common set of cross-platform APIs to target that architecture. For example, a cell phone maker can open source most of their OS, but keep pieces like the fancy ML integrated into their photography app (and other similar pieces) proprietary.
> Nvidia fully understands that maybe some nebulous benefit might come to them by open sourcing things, maybe years down the line.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. The benefits of open feel nebulous; it's a long-tail effect and difficult to quantify. It also takes time. On the other hand, the benefits of proprietary are short-term and easy to quantify. Wrong business decisions get made all the time. Indeed, bad business decisions sometimes get made where everyone can tell it's the wrong decision -- it's just org structures are set up to make those decisions. I think this isn't me claiming to be brilliant or smarter than NVidia so much as NVidia failing in the same exact way many organizations fail, by the design of the org structures.
> They understand plucky researchers can do amazing things, sometimes.
It's actually not just about amazing things. It's about a long tail of dumb stuff too. My phone has a few apps better than Google could build. It has dozens of apps Google chose not to build. Most of the stuff I want to do isn't big enough to ever show up on NVidia's radar, but there are a lot of people like me. Symbian didn't make a piano tuner app. It's not hard to make one. I have one, though.
Of course, there are brilliant pieces too. I have some VR/AR apps on my phone which Google would need to invest a lot of capital to make.
> EDIT: I'll also say that if this changes from their "major open source announcement" they were going to do at GTC, I'll eat my hat. I'm not expecting much from Nvidia in terms of open source, but I'd happily be proven wrong. But broadly I think my general point stands, which is that thinking about it from the POV of "open source drivers are the limitation" isn't really the right way to think about it.
I'm not holding my breath for NVidia to change. But I do hope at some point, we'll see a nice, open MIMD architecture which gives me that nice 10-100x speedup for parallel workloads. I actually couldn't care less about whether that speed-up is 50x or 100x (which is where NVidia's deep R&D advantage lies). That matters for bitcoin mining or deep learning. For the long tail I'm talking about, the baseline speedup is plenty good enough. The cleverness doesn't come from pushing extra CPU cycles out, but in APIs, ecosystem building, openness, standardization, etc. That stuff is a different kind of hard.