It's arguable in the case of ARM/Mali but sadly, there is for NVidia.
Their driver are not merely to "communicate" with the hardware. The driver include a lot of hotfix and optimization, sometimes specific to one game/application. The driver give them a competitive advantage over their competitor. They will probably never released it for free.
They could do the same thing AMD did, which is keep their game/application API optimizations secret within a proprietary userspace stack, but also make it work with the open source Mesa/Gallium3d stack. Leave the OpenGL/Vulkan software development part to software developers (or keep doing it yourself if you think it's that important), but at least tell us how to drive your hardware.
Interestingly, amdgpu/Mesa performance seems to be higher for typical game rendering than AMD's proprietary stack. I suspect at some point in the future AMD will abandon their 'pro' proprietary stack entirely after realizing they should stick to being a hardware business.
> I suspect at some point in the future AMD will abandon their 'pro' proprietary stack entirely after realizing they should stick to being a hardware business.
John Bridgman of AMD confirmed it's their plan like 5+ years ago. The only reason they ever maintained proprietary stack on Linux is workstation users who need certified OpenGL implementation for various proprietary software.
By now the only proprietary parts of "pro" stack are OpenGL implementation and shader compiler for Vulkan / OpenCL. Everything else in "pro" package is open source already. There is still legacy OpenCL implementation, but I guess ROCm will be used for everything soon.
I whish they would go the same way that AMD did, but I doubt we will see it any time soon. The thing is, AMD/ATI lost the software war against NVidia for quite a while now. AMD didn't have much to lose by open-sourcing their driver. And the AMD proprietary driver on Linux where always a mess, whereas NVidia at least "work" (even though they just refuse to play well with the linux env...).
Now, with NVidia diving more and more into the ML / GPGPU market (which is less windows-focused), they might have more pressure to actually open-source their driver (or at least, finally make them actually integrated properly with Linux), at least for their server focused hardware. But I wouldn't bet on it any time soon.
Let's be honest, they have a dominant position on the market. And their driver, as awful as they are, work. I think a lot of things would have to change for them to have the incentive to open-source them. My only hope at this point is that, with the growing GPGPU market, they might finally start to see Linux not as a second-class citizen.
Their driver are not merely to "communicate" with the hardware. The driver include a lot of hotfix and optimization, sometimes specific to one game/application. The driver give them a competitive advantage over their competitor. They will probably never released it for free.