I'm confused! Why would Nvidia want to keep any of this closed source. Surely they make money when people buy graphics cards, and having open source out-of-the-box graphics support in Linux would mean they would sell more graphics cards?
They only really care about Linux usage in embedded computers (Jetson) and in datacenters, and Free drivers would allow you to modify them to permit using consumer GPUs in virtual machines. Currently, you need to spend significantly more money for an enterprise GPU that has the same specs as a consumer GPU just so the driver will allow you to use GPU passthrough. They did recently allow consumers to pass a GPU to a single Windows VM guest so you could run a Windows-only game, but you can't split access to the single GPU among multiple VMs.
Drivers are a large part of the development costs of a GPU, just like how an operating system is a large part of the development cost of a general computer.
If nVidia open sourced all their drivers tomorrow the risk of some cheap Chinese shop making clones of their hardware and re-targeting the nVidia drivers to get lots of the features would be very high. It'd significantly reduce the value of what they'd built (to them).
Really, I don't get why so many Linux users ask questions like this. Most software is proprietary because it costs money to develop. This site we're talking on isn't open source. Windows isn't. macOS / iOS isn't. Games generally aren't. Google isn't. Azure/Bing aren't. Open source is the exception, not the norm.
AMD and Intel both have open source video drivers and I really doubt anyone has cloned them.
The non-free features for the Nvidia cards and many other chips are achieved by the card itself running closed source binaries. It is actually probably a better way to protect IP anyway since no one can decompile the encrypted binary (well until recently...).
Open source and proprietary software exist as a duality. It's not an absolute expectation that everything will be open source but Nvidia is very late vs its competitors.
Google, Windows, macOS, etc. all have large open source parts. Games are kind of an exception because they are treated like a single work of art. Also, crucially no other software or hardware has a game as a dependency so interoperability isn't a concern.
AMD and Intel aren't (or weren't at least) shipping cutting edge GPU tech so there's less need to look to them for ideas and shortcuts anyway.
Well I used to work at Google and the open source parts are a tiny, tiny fraction of their actual codebase. Windows isn't really open source at all, although in recent years a few utilities have been opened up - note, only after Windows stopped being so important to Microsoft.
And as for macOS. Well. You can download and read some code, sometimes. Good luck trying to actually build it or do anything useful with it at all. You'll find that it's (a) completely undocumented and (b) all depends on internal stuff you don't have access to. An exception is WebKit.
You mean, like Intel GPU drivers with just the libre free-as-in-freedom kernel and MESA? Blender? Krita? Cinelerra-CV?
Darktable? ImageMagick? FFMPEG? KVM/Qemu? Most programming languages and frameworks? Clang/LLVM?
WTF are you talking about?
If any, science today it's made thanks to FLOSS software, propietary software it's the exception.
And the trend it looking worse for propietary environments.
Money will come from support and integration, not for the software.
A complex, scientific related reproducible ad-hoc environment for Guix may cost a little more on a single PC than a a propietary OS license and setting up the rest for yourself, but you will be able to replicate that setup everywhere and forever and on a guaranteed basis that once your paper/experiment it's replicated, yo get the same environment no matter where and how.
That's the difference.
Krita? You're just naming random open source Linux programs that hardly anyone uses.
Yes, we can all make long lists of open source projects. That's not my point. The point is that the average person, on an average day, is using lots of proprietary software (or proprietary forks of open source software).
I've been hearing about how the future of software is charging for support tickets and hand-waved 'integration' for 30 years. The biggest, richest and most powerful tech firms today all ignored that advice. There's only one company that did well out of that approach and they're now called IBM.
