nvidia-installer was inspired by the loki_update tool: http://www.lokigames.com/development/loki_update.php3/

The FTP and HTTP support in nvidia-installer is based upon snarf 7.0: http://www.xach.com/snarf/

The self-extracting archive (aka .run file) is generated using makeself.sh: http://www.megastep.org/makeself/