I think open sourcing drivers makes pragmatic sense to the Linux community more than it does with Bitkeeper. Without open source drivers, how can the Linux community make Nvidia's drivers a better citizen of their ecosystem?
Linus probably doesn't care if Nvidia wants to keep their GPU _accelerated_ drivers closed for desktop machines.
Nvidia Optimus is what Linus is talking about. It switches between an Intel GMA and an Nvidia GPU "transparently" for power saving reasons. Nvidia gave the whole Linux community the shaft and didn't provide any Linux support at all for those laptops and notebooks.
Laptop and notebook designers generally end up with designs that only work when power saving works correctly, and the failure mode isn't "runs slower," it's "catches fire and destroy things." So the lack of any help from Nvidia is not something that can be ignored - your laptop will be worse than useless if you put Linux on it.
That is why I sympathize with Linus here. I'm also very upset with nVidia over Optimus, but on Windows, for reasons I've mentioned in other comments. Optimus really just seems like an afterthought to nVidia. As long as it switches GPUs when the PC goes into energy-conserving mode, they think it's working just fine.
That's a typical hardware company's response - deliver only half-baked functionality and leave the debugging to platform integrators. Nvidia reaps the marketing bonus points. Laptop companies have to put in the time to actually get the power savings.
Still, I don't think many people were aware that Linux wasn't (ever * ) going to work on Optimus laptops and notebooks - and Linus' comments have helped raise awareness of the issue.
