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@mangeurdenuage @SuperDicq "re: Please continue to ignore all anti competitive/customer behavior"

Or maybe work on reading comprehension?? And the idea not everyone shares your obsessions??

In any case, Nvidia is my paradigmatic example of a company using proprietary software as part of a strategy that has created something very important, very useful, that would have never been done as FOSS. Note if AI is a bubble this would still be true, GPGPU computing is useful for many things, for example TSMC uses CUDA to do some nasty computational work in making masks et. al.

Not a clean example because FOSS really doesn't have a hardware equivalent, nor will it for the short term foreseeable future because of analog IP that's required for any chip to be useful (the nasty realm when you have to go off chip, even if its a digital protocol on top like DRAM). Although you could legitimately treat that as akin to black box firmware. Still, it's very expensive to design and verify high end logic stuff, see how slow RISC-V progress is on the high end.

That might change when what remains of Moore's Law ends, things get standardized and companies in addition to TSMC can do cutting edge logic (Samsung can't do that anymore, Intel is in saving throw mode after the "10 nm" botch and its inability to deal with that for years). Although for some time Apple has been the driver of semiconductor logic innovation, paying TSMC handsomely to create new nodes ASAP.