It's easy to assume that theres a cause and effect relationship between Linus's words and Nvidia's actions, but we have no evidence this is the case, and shouldn't jump to such conclusions.
I'm not disagreeing with you but in this case I can share with you how I reasoned to that particular statement.
I've been around enough to know that there is always an effect of being called out in public, by a credible critic, inside of a company. What that effect is can vary based on how the corporate culture views itself.
In this particular case I have had over the years a bit more visibility inside [1] the company than some others. And I had been working very hard to get access to their acceleration into third party OSes. The developer program was verbally very supportive of that, but actually not so much. After a lot of work and investigation the proximate cause was the extreme patent mess around graphics and Nvidia's aggressive use of same to deal with competition.
I also discovered that at the executive level there was a belief that Nvidia was very supportive of Linux and third party use of their drivers. And even though I suggested reality was quite different than that, it didn't really affect their thinking.
When Linus called them out, and the coverage of that went viral, I thought to myself "This is going to be hard to explain in the context of an impression of support." In some ways having Nvidia not threaten or attack the nouveaux work was a big step forward. Actually contributing patches suggests to me complete surrender (or acceptance) of making "real" the notion of supporting third party use of their gear.
[1] My history was that a friend of mine from Sun was one fo the founders, he introduced me to the development program when the NV1 came out, I interviewed with them but did not take the job, but while at NetApp they were one of NetApps "Top 20" customers and I often spent time with their engineering teams working on ways their design flow would work better on network attached storage. A couple of former Intel colleagues ended up there, and a number of folks came over from there to Google when I was at Google as well. So while visibility was certainly incomplete, it wasn't strictly what was reported by the press.
