The fear could be that NVIDIAs "hacks" helps with performance and playing by the rules of the kernel developers will cost... say 10% in performance, that would be a pretty big hit for many.
I don't think there's a fear that NVIDIA will stop developing Linux drivers, that doesn't seem realistic, but I also doubt that they are going to open any more than they absolutely have to. NVIDIA isn't a open source friendly company and no Linux kernel hacks are going to change that. They'll change when it's financially beneficial to do so.
So... in what way does opening the source of the driver makes the authorship go away?
You made a bunch of claims based on having no information about the subject that have nothing to do with the post you replied to...
Like... what am I supposed to do with what you wrote?
---
As an aside, from my personal experience, NVidia is a very bureaucratic company with very few people having much of an authority over software it writes. It also has a culture of restricting many freedoms to their employees (as in, mandating OS for their laptops, taking away root privileges on work laptops, requiring a lot of unnecessary reporting when dealing with programming issues etc.)
I would expect that the decision to not open-source the driver was based on some policy established ages ago. Nobody can remember who and for what reason made the decision, but nobody is bold enough to challenge it. Mostly because the organization grew too big and the decision must've been probably made by some title which no longer exists and whoever is in "position of power" now doesn't have any real power.
As for performance... well, I wouldn't expect it to tank. Here's one anecdote that I know about since I'm personally affected by it. On laptops with two graphic adapters (typically Intel and NVidia) where one is used for power-saving mode and another one for better 3D rendering, when such a laptop is connected via HDMI to a big monitor, NVidia's adapter starts overheating and using a lot of unnecessary resources. Turns out someone left out some kernel logging in the very hot loop of the piece of the driver related to HDMI probing.
In other words, I wouldn't be surprised if NVidia's driver would overall benefit from few extra pairs of eyes looking at it. It's hard to imagine that they somehow found a way to utilize system resources so much better than a legitimate driver would. And even if they did, there's a good chance they'd be able to convince Linux kernel developers to let them have it.
I don't disagree that the drivers could benefit from a few extra people looking at them... though I doubt that many outside AMD is looking at the Radeon drivers. There's no harm in NVIDIA opening their drivers, but they won't do it, nor do they like that the kernel developers are saying that users are on their own if they do load their proprietary drivers.
Now what I originally tried to address was people defending NVIDIA, because their work depends heavily on things working as they currently do and what they are looking at now is an ever so slightly more uncertain future.
Edit: Oh I see, you're confused about "if the thing that powers their products suddenly taken from them", is that what you're thinking in terms of authorship? I'm referring to having the drivers taken away, feature, performance, whatever the negative outcome could be in the mind of those defending NVIDIA.
