I don't have so much of a problem with CUDA staying closed, but rather Nvidia sabotaging Nouveau through signed firmware which they don't release (and obfuscate in their blob). Nouveau would be probably be decent by now (not as fast or feature complete, but usable for real workloads on newer cards) if it weren't for the fact that Nvidia has added features which have the direct effect of making it impossible to have a competitive open source driver.
Maybe something will change on this soon. There was speculation about this: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-O.... But I'm not holding my breath, and it would be nice if the solution wasn't "wait and hope until Nvidia releases the software necessary to control their GPUs".
> I don't have so much of a problem with CUDA staying closed, but rather Nvidia sabotaging Nouveau through signed firmware which they don't release (and obfuscate in their blob)
Do you have more info on this ? There is a big difference between not supporting open source, and actively sabotaging it. What are they doing, exactly ?
Look up "nouveau signed firmware". Phoronix has a bunch of articles on it. The Nouveau developers also talk about it at FOSDEM 2018 (and probably a later conference). This comment is a good intro: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-d...
TL;DR starting with the 9xx series, Nvidia started making it so their GPUs would only run firmwares signed by them (likely to prevent counterfeits, i.e. 2060s sold as 2080s). So it is impossible to control the fans and reclock the GPU. There's no workaround, so even as the person who owns the device, I can't run my own firmware. AMD has signed firmwares too, but they actually release sufficient blobs to fully run the device.
Maybe something will change on this soon. There was speculation about this: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-O.... But I'm not holding my breath, and it would be nice if the solution wasn't "wait and hope until Nvidia releases the software necessary to control their GPUs".