It's a big day for open source fans now that NVIDIA, the last member of the "big three" chip makers with AMD and Intel, has signed on with the Linux foundation. The company has previously kept the system at arms length, with users relying on reverse-engineering to get things working nicely with Linus' baby. It's joining Fluenco, Lineo and Mocana, three companies who also became signatories to the foundation at the same time. Whilst there's no commitment to provide drivers for its chipsets, at least there's a glimmer of hope that the company will contribute -- especially given the growing popularity of its mobile platforms.

Linus Torvalds may have dabbled in Apple territory in the past, but he's definitely not mincing any words about competing operating systems now. In a recent interview, Linus says that OS X is a "much better system" than Windows Vista overall, but that "in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for." Apparently these problems are rooted firmly in OS X's file system (HFS and HFS+), which he describes as "complete and utter crap," and even "scary." Of course, Torvalds also took the opportunity to tout the many virtues of Linux, which he says is an "obvious choice for anything from full-blown PCs to phones or video players." Damn straight it is.

[Photo courtesy of AP, thanks Ash]