NVIDIA responds to Linus Torvalds' critique: 'supporting Linux is important'

Linux creator Linus Torvalds didn't mince any words with his criticism of NVIDIA earlier this week -- calling it, among other things, the "single worst company we've ever dealt with." That unsurprisingly didn't go unnoticed by NVIDIA, which has today issued a statement that attempts clarify its position on the open source OS. It leads off by flatly stating that "supporting Linux is important to NVIDIA," before addressing some of the criticisms that have been leveled at it from Torvalds' and others. That includes its lack of Linux support for its Optimus laptop graphics, to which NVIDIA points to its support of the Bumblebee open source project, and its decision to not provide detailed documentation on all of its GPU internals -- on that, it says that it's "made a decision to support Linux on our GPUs by leveraging NVIDIA common code, rather than the Linux common infrastructure." The company goes on to note that it supports a variety of GPUs on Linux and is an active participant in the ARM Linux kernel, but acknowledges that its position "may not please everyone." We're going to go out on a limb and guess that includes Torvalds. Hit the source link below for the full statement.