Nvidia is free to not give out any graphics driver, however, that would make their graphics cards unfunctional and hard to sell.
However, if nvidia has sold me a functional graphics card including the driver as an unalienable part of the package that I purchased (since the driver being functional is part of the card being 'fit for purpose' of the sale), I should be free to use the driver without any unreasonable restrictions. I have legally bought [a copy] of it, it's not copyright infringement for me to run it on a computer - even if it resides in a datacenter.
My whole point is that there needs to be more efforts to hack and modify these things, and that this would be "more desireable".
And that orgs should be using their power to cause this to happen more. For example, if open source orgs can weaponize licensing agreements against nvidia, in order to force them to do this, then they should and this would be desireable.
> You have options? Nobody is forcing you to buy Nvidia hardware.
Laptops are generally an all or nothing proposition. I wanted a laptop with a high performance CPU and the nvidia GPU just came along with it. Couldn't even disable the thing in firmware since hardware video decoding with the Intel GPU caused kernel panics.
If you claim it matters, but not enough to impact the purchasing decision, did it actually matter?
Like you showed your disapproval of Nvidia by giving them your money anyway. So... They're right - people care enough to complain, but not buy something else, so it doesn't really matter.
