My understanding is _a lot_ of stuff in Nvidia drivers isn't _technically_ owned by them. As in they license out A company to make Y thing with Z license. After 20+ years of legacy those weird licenses add up, and no-one feels comfortable with releasing the code. Whether or not that's true? Hard to say... For comparison AMD has been (since 2015) working hard to make nearly all parts of their drivers upstream in some fashion (amdgpu). While that's not a 1:1 comparison there (AMD has less capital than Nvidia) it shows it _is_ possible to free these drivers.