I would love to gain the idea that’s possible what are the downsides and upsides. Based on that philosophy Nvidia is impossible right now.
Regardless of your stance on GPL or not, I find the firmware stance very strange.
If software is made available to you, you must reject it. But as long as the hardware runs it behind closed doors, you can use it.
The CPU microcode situation is a good example. You can run your CPU, having no idea what it is doing or how it works. No problem. But if they ship an update to fix a bug, you cannot apply that update unless it is open source. The “free” choice is to run known vulnerabilities on top of the black box. And the in-chip behaviour is complex enough that Intel chips included a whole UNIX-like operating system in them (Minix) and people did not even realize it. The same is true for every chip in your system. Crazy.
If you are not going to demand open hardware, there is no point in being so absolutist about the firmware. That is even if you want to be truly hard core about the software running on top.
on principle it’s good that somebody tries to keep it alive but libre and suckless suck for day to day desktop use
I ran Trisquel 9 on my Dell T3600 desktop for a few years. I never noticed anything malfunctioning, but systemd was annoying so I switched to slackware15. My nvidia kepler gpu worked perfectly, and even my logitech webcam worked.
