I didn't work on this but I have watched it with interest for a very long time. It has been a strategic initiative in order to improve the GPU compute ecosystem. No one loves having a tainted kernel and everyone who uses a GPU with Linux (which is almost all data center GPUs) would prefer to have the kernel modules open source. It took a lot of work and planning to figure out how to do this over many teams for a very long time, and then an enormous amount of testing to prove the new drivers were fast enough to be deployed.
It could be quite interesting to outline just how far back in time this started (with lots of details), considering those demands to open-source certain code that were apparently made around March 3rd this year.
My own motivation is to believe that NVidia isn't as broken as everyone insists it is, I guess :) and more broadly speaking it honestly seems like a Good And Interesting Idea to make the situation more clear in any case, particularly given the coverage and significant collective awareness it's attracted.
This functionality has been rolled out (shipping) for the past year. From the blog post:
"This was made possible by the phased rollout of the GSP driver architecture over the past year, designed to make the transition easy for NVIDIA customers.
https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/510.39.01/R..."
And further, the GSP driver arch depends on the GSP controller available on Turing and later GPU's. Per wikipedia Turing was unveiled in 2018, so I guess design work was started several years prior to that unveiling. Not saying the decision to open source the driver was made back in 2015(?) or so, but the wheels were set in motion that eventually enabled the open source decision a long time ago.
So that people could not bypass DRM (Digital Rights Management, not Direct Rendering Manager). And signing the firmware would not help because with source code it is easier to find vulnerabilities in signature verification code. Though they still could publish the firmware partially.
