That's disingenuous. Maintaining a stable driver API is far from free, and the project has done just fine without one since its inception. Nvidia is not playing

That's disingenuous. Maintaining a stable driver API is far from free, and the project has done just fine without one since its inception. Nvidia is not playing by the rules, and there's an alternative vendor. Why spend extra effort just to help them? Assuming that a stable kernel API would just make things better ignores the potential downsides. I don't recall the name of the talk, but someone did comparative research into BSD kernel security and found that backwards compatibility was a significant source of bugs and that OpenBSD has benefited greatly from their aggressive removal of such code. There's no reason to doubt that this holds true for Linux as well