I have seen this concern countless times, but not why that matters to them. I can understand it matters from Linus' perspective as kernel maintainer, but from users perspective I can't really get the issue. Anyways, not all code that runs on your system is open source. Why not demand your bootloader manufacturer for open source with the same intensity. If say NVIDIA wants the driver to contain malicious backdoor, open source is not going to stop them.
> from users perspective I can't really get the issue ... If say NVIDIA wants the driver to contain malicious backdoor, open source is not going to stop them.
No, but if such a backdoor were discovered, it would be possible to do something about it. The quote from the article in top comment here says it well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23944954
> Anyways, not all code that runs on your system is open source.
Not yet, but it is my goal. If/when that's achieved, I'd also like to run it exclusively on free/libre/open (FLO) hardware.
> Why not demand your bootloader manufacturer for open source with the same intensity.
My bootloader plays a much smaller role in my computing endeavors than my gpu. And less importantly, as a practical matter, there's many more major motherboard vendors, and few FLO alternatives; whereas both nvidia alternatives (amd, integrated intel) do have FLO drivers.
It means when people are trying to do things like experiment with how to make for example frame timing more useful, such that specs like Vulkan can advance[1], we can't experiment with & try to advance & figure out what might work, because closed proprietary software doesn't allow mankind to explore & progress.
We basically have to keep going back to Nvidia & relying on them to be authorities on their own system & to be acting in everyone's interest when we try to develop extensions like VK_EXT_present_timing. This greatly injures the development of good standards, obstructing there from being a collaborative healthy environment where people can work together to make standards that work well.
Another example is EGLStreams which is not that bad but very different approach to handling video buffers from what everyone else does which has been obstructing the use of the newer Wayland display server on nvidia hardware for 6 years now[2]. Nvidia wants their thing, & closed drivers mean no one can play around & attempt to make their hardware work if they wanted to. Ridiculously harsh limitations, no choice, no experimenting.
O yea users don't give a shit. But it's further reduction and shrinking of the playing field to corporate giants that'll only share details with other giants to develop products.
The problem isn't inherently that the drivers are closed source, it's that Nvidia is actively hostile towards the ecosystem. For instance Mesa added a generic buffer management API (GBM) allowing compositors like Weston to be hardware accelerated using OpenGL. Nvidia could have followed suite and supported GBM but instead went their own route with EGLStreams. So now Wayland, XWayland and every single Wayland compositor has to implement Nvidia specific code to support their hardware.
I have seen this concern countless times, but not why that matters to them. I can understand it matters from Linus' perspective as kernel maintainer, but from users perspective I can't really get the issue. Anyways, not all code that runs on your system is open source. Why not demand your bootloader manufacturer for open source with the same intensity. If say NVIDIA wants the driver to contain malicious backdoor, open source is not going to stop them.