With the R515 driver, NVIDIA released a set of Linux GPU kernel modules in May 2022 as open source with dual GPL and MIT licensing. The initial release targeted datacenter compute GPUs…
what I understood from when they initally started this was it like an open source wrapper around a big proprietary blob. It's better than what they had previously, and they could at least get the wrapper into the mainline kernel which they couldn't before. I mean AMD has a firmware blob too tbf, but to a lesser extent than Nvidia's new kernel module.