Uh... FreeBSD has Nvidia drivers and Nvidia techs are quite eager to support it. If Linux has 1% of the desktop market, FreeBSD must have less than 1% of 1%. I'd say go for it; approach Nvidia about a driver, but be very polite and try not to take up too much of their support time because you're not exactly making them any money to pay for that support time. You probably will have to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
Ethin wrote:
The fact that Linux needed to make an open-source driver *before* NVIDIA gave us drivers for Linux, if memory serves, should tell you something.
No, it shouldn't tell us something; things were different in that era. Basically all corporate attitudes to open source were different. It was even illegal to mod games. When Nvidia first released drivers for Linux, things were beginning to change. IBM had famously embraced Linux, much to everyones surprise. Nvidia weren't the first hardware vendors to accept Linux, but they were quite early. Relatively few other hardware vendors had. ATi may have released more documentation, but it was poor documentation. ATi drivers for Linux were much poorer-quality than Nvidia's for many years. Intel, of course, were not remotely competitive in graphics performance for over a decade.
Linus Torvalds complained about the closed-source nature of Nvidia drivers more than once, but this was because he and other Linux kernel devs didn't have the right to use debuggers on it. They couldn't see if the Nvidia driver was causing problems. I'm sure it's different for kernel devs who have signed the NDA to allow them to look into the driver. As a user using Nvidia drivers with stable Linux kernel versions, I only once had a problem which may or may not have been Nvidia's fault. I had more problems with Intel drivers at a time when Intel were enthusiastic contributors to Linux!