This makes me more than a little bit nervous. I just saw the news this morning - didn't get any tech news yesterday - so I've not looked deeply into it but phrases like "patent coverage" make me twitchy. If this agreement is in place until 2012, what happens in 2013? Remember software patents are bad, so any agreement that is based on them is tainted too.

Miguel has a list of links relating to the story.

Discussion on opensuse-factory regarding the removal of tiny-nvidia-installer from the distro. Ends up discussing the legal implications of shipping NVIDIA drivers. Incidentally, the current method of installing them is a RIGHT PAIN! Now, I'm able to use them, and that's fine, it's just an annoying delay when the kernel package is updated to have to reboot (have to do that anyway for the new kernel) and select runlevel 3. Then rebuild the drivers and enter runlevel 5. For a non-technical user, they're better off not having hardware acceleration and sticking to the nv driver.

If NVIDIA GPLed the drivers, they could either be integrated into the main kernel tree or legally patched in by distros.

Alternatively, if some intrepid kernel hackers (Greg?) were to attempt to write pukka GPL kernel drivers for NVIDIA cards, this could allow the nv driver to be extended. This would probably a seriously popular piece of code because NVIDIA chipsets are so prevalent in the market.