Linux

Man, that would be so nice. I forgot actually for a while that I was using Nouveau after I switched cause nvidia-dkms wouldn't let me boot (1050ti). The only thing that reminds me is game performance. Wayland is great though.

Driver code might expose some underlying secret sauce they're using in the hardware. That's the justification they always used to give, at any rate. At this point, though, it's probably some code they've inherited from an acquisition that has a bunch of legal encumbrance stopping it from being open sources.

Likely a combination of 4 things:

1. They have third party firmware in their blobs that they are under NDA regarding the source code.

2. They believe in the source code is a large part of their success and don't want to reveal it.

3. They believe giving out the source code will allow many inferior variants of the software, impacting their brand.

4. Control; the more source code they have in mesa the more of their code can be rejected by mesa. Keeping their stuff as blobs allows them to put in whatever hacks they want.

I assume nVidia have licensed other code that they don't have the rights to distribute the source code for.

I get what the GPL fans want here, but it's just going to lead to a gimped driver, no driver, or an even larger shim between the open and closed source bits. The Linux market is too small for nVidia to care.

I've had a mixed experience with my newer AMD card, and that's being charitable.

Would having their own distro even help? It seems like working around this would require forking from Linux at a lower level, and even that would only circumvent technical (rather than copyright) barriers.

There's an interesting discussion about the whole topic on the Phoronix forums about this. Some people claim that removing them and Nvidia's current behavior is a DMCA violation:

1. The kernel includes IP only licensed under GPLv2.
2. While a module linked against the kernel isn't necessarily a derived work which in turn would need to be licensed GPLv2 as well, there are specific interfaces that are meant for internal use and by their very nature would make your work derived if using them. These are the interfaces marked EXPORT_GPL_ONLY.
3. Using these interfaces with a module not licensed GPLv2, you taint the kernel and violate the licensing.
4. Removing the check, you aren't necessarily yet violating GPLv2, but you're removing a technical protection measure which is a violation of the DMCA.

It also raises the question why you'd remove checks that only prevent a possible GPLv2 violation if you're not violating GPLv2 anyways as Nvidia claims.

They are not legally allowed to build drivers from the illegally acquired source code.

I belive the NVK work is where that headed. The released code wasn't up to snuff for true kernel intergration on it own, but offered a lot of insights for devs working on the problem.

Meanwhile me using ublock adblocker and flawlessly reading the content on firefox

Which browser are you using? Perhaps it has some built in blocking

don’t expect that it will make them popular with anyone who actually uses Nvidia drivers on Linux

The group to be annoyed at are Nvidia. Plain and simple.

I think end users wouldn't care either, they probably wouldn't even understand what's actually happening, they'll only notice performance degrading (if this is the case) and blame Linux for it.

That's not to say this shouldn't be done, I just wish there was better control on license violations and those doing it on purpose, like Nvidia in this case, would be seriously punished to make them think twice next time.