For something this popular it shouldn't be so hard. I don't think being related to hardware is an excuse. CUDA is not a driver and exists entirely in userspace.
This is the kind of thing that happens when you're dealing with a monopoly.
The economic incentive is simple: open-sourcing the driver will allow an open-source API to interact with the hardware, allowing AMD/other competitors to support the same API. So instead of competing at the silicon level, Nvidia chooses to set up unnecessary barriers to entry at massive cost to developers/users.
unnecessary? not in the eyes of the shareholders. just compare NVIDIAs stock surge with the performance of AMD. they protect their market and they do it pretty well.
the Linus video is awesome though :-) And I totally understand his sentiment
Yes - I would think drivers are even harder from an engineering point of view but as far as I know they have fairly good backwards compatibility for games. I think this is likely because people would be much more reluctant to buy new graphics cards if they broke their older games.
This is the kind of thing that happens when you're dealing with a monopoly.