The risk to Nvidia is much lower than ZoL -- Nvidia has the resources to keep up with the kernel. It's maintained in house by the company selling the cards, and

The risk to Nvidia is much lower than ZoL -- Nvidia has the resources to keep up with the kernel. It's maintained in house by the company selling the cards, and they have the resources directly to do development. But just like ZoL, if the Kernel makes more and more breaking changes, Nvidia would eventually make the business decision to cut the proprietary driver loose. However that threshold is likely much higher for a profitable company than a community funded project. But the real price of being an external module is very clear for Nvidia proprietary driver issues. If you look at distro and kernel bug reports, you'll see piles of reports for Nvidia driver users, which devs won't look into because of the tainted kernel. Some Linux software even blacklists Nvidia driver users from using graphics hardware acceleration for their apps, because it causes so many bugs. Nvidia is operating outside of the open source ecosystem, which means they don't benefit from that ecosystem like open source implementations do. When an Nvidia driver user runs into a bug, they're usually just told to shove off and not use the driver.