Why is it not compulsory to release the source code from day 1? If you're making a driver it's because you're selling hardware, that's where your profit and value is. Commingling the two leads to perverse incentives and conflicts of interest.
But I think NVidia would be perfectly fine financially if they gave this out.
Nvidia and AMD both support DX versions below DX12 in their silicon, they don't have to emulate anything which means better performance.
Even if Intel had access to Nvidia and AMD's driver source codes, none of it would be useful because they don't have the silicon.
* https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/blob/main/src/uti...
* https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/blob/main/src/uti...
Nvidia's biggest product is CUDA.
There's also the matter of lawsuits. If you get a device, they're not supporting updates, so you go get a 3rd party update and it ruins the device, the RMA costs the manufacture, but worse, the customer(s) may file a (class action) lawsuit against the company over the problem of being unable to find the official firmware/driver updates, causing people to ruin their hardware, get RMA rejections, or not even being aware of an RMA process and simply buying another one.
Personally, I'd rather there be open source drivers/firmware for everything from day one, but to look at both sides, I fully understand the liability and why that's something that only exists in the hobbiest world.
> Because if I can rewrite my printer to not intentionally be a total piece of shit, the company gets less money by intentionally expiring or wasting ink, DRM locking ink cartridge brands, or "service needed" bricking the device after a period of time.
That sounds exactly like the "perverse incentives and conflicts of interest" that the parent comment mentioned. I don't think they're asking why it isn't required now, but why it _shouldn't_ be required. What you're saying sounds more compelling as an argument in favor of what they propose, not in favor of the status quo.
This is exactly the kind of perverse incentives that I'm talking about though. And this kind of misbehavior happens way more than someone installing a 3rd party update that bricks someone's device.
The example I'm thinking of is Nvidia's newer GPUs and DLSS. The hardware would come with open drivers, but if you want the upscaling that's an additional fee. While maintaining additional drivers is more work for companies, I think they'd actually benefit from this because it could be a recurring revenue stream for older hardware.