Your friend works for nVidia.
But the issue is not so much opening up a current driver as it is even allowing an open source one to be developed.
Like AMD. They’ll never open Catalyst. That hasn’t stopped them from creating and helping the creation of the open source Gallium3d drivers.
AMD has in a sense outsourced their driver development. In the long run, it could save them millions. They have several companies and individuals doing the hard work for them and to my knowledge, not getting paid for it.
They could theoretically, even realistically some point way down the road only support their newest line of cards for a very short period of time, then let the community support itself after that because the driver is open.
I’m pretty sure that there exists open source drivers for Nvidia - but it’s an apple to the proprietary orange - again if I have my facts straight. If I’m right the open source one will allow for some functionality of the hardware but to get the cutting edge performance needed for cutting edge applications (read games) - open source just will not cut it.
I don’t see this model changing going forward. If you’re in graphics chip development the whole raison d’etre for your company is to stay on the bleeding edge. And this involves proprietary hardware design. To hint at how the hardware is built by opening up the driver is - well it’s just completely contrary to the whole notion of staying one step ahead of any competition.
People tend to think that there’s a bright line between hardware (chips) and software (driver). There’s not. Whatever you can do in one you can do in the other depending on a number of factors. Just as a graphics chip maker won’t put their (detailed) hardware architecture/implementation in the public domain they won’t put their driver source in the public domain either, for one thing because it provides insight into what the hardware itself is doing and for another thing there may be tricks they are actually doing in software that are equally proprietary.