It's not about making it 'free' in the sense of money. The term free often infers money, but in this regards its more about the philosophy of freedom itself, not cost of product.

We as consumers should not be held back from using hardware the way that we intend to use it. Nvidia does not have any right to hinder us from using what we purchased how we see fit. (Provided that we are not infringing upon copyrights and/or I.P.)

yes, that's always been the primary underlying reason AFAIK, there's too much licensed code involved in their driver stack, and they don't care to spend the time re-implementing those components.

Ironically, they wouldn't need to spend the time re-implementing those componenents and dealing with licenses if they had just made their code open source to begin with.

The community would likely gladly help them with anything we can help with; and licenses would be less of an issue. It wouldn't be the first time closed source stuff has been made alternatives to it in open source specifically for reasons like licensing. MP3 for instance... not a terribly hard thing to deal with anymore, but once upon a time ago..

Anyways. Nvidia's true reason for doing anything is ultimately in their namesake. They want people to be envious. Part of making people envious is to keep things they want away from them.

So, yeah... that's the real reason. If they actually gave a flying fuck about the rest of us, they wouldn't be that way.