Nvidia to release documentation on Nouveau project
I think the reality is that most software engineers are starting to get tired of Windows and OSX, and the kind of people nVidia wants to hire don't want to contribute proprietary blobs to Linux when they can just work for the competition on open-source stuff.  Thus, nVidia is kind of forced by the market to let the engineers make at least token contributions to Linux.(This is also why DRM never works; the type of person that could implement it correctly wouldn't want to implement it correctly.)