I find it disgusting that most people here are defending NVIDIA. This is literally victim blaming; Linux devs are victims of license/contract violation. NVIDIA has no right to be doing this and are acting above the law.
The kernel devs wouldn't have to put these defenses if NVIDIA played fair and just open-sourced their driver like every other major GPU vendor.
I thought the nvidia kernel driver is open sourced? https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules
It says it's dual licensed MIT/GPL2