A coworker of mine formerly worked on Nvidia's proprietary drivers. They remarked at just how wrong the Nouveau driver was about certain things, including the functionality and reasons for certain registers.
Around a decade ago, I was introduced to a couple people who it turned out worked at nvidia. After a bunch of conversation, nouveau came up; they were intensely negative about it, mocking it and its developers, criticizing its existence, even, and declaring it would never amount to anything. (Meanwhile, I was running it on a computer at home and it was significantly more stable than the nvidia proprietary driver at the time, and performed well enough for my use.)
I wish I'd had more conversational courage at the time to "stand up" for nouveau with them; it was super rude to shit on someone else's hard work, especially when the reason why they had to do that hard work was because nvidia was a bunch of jerks with a shitty FOSS policy.
That's completely fucked up and has soured my opinion of nvidia and the people involved with it more than anything they've ever officially done as a company.
