I think this is a great question. The reasons given for graphics drivers not being open are quite reasonable and I will exclude that quality from that discussi

I think this is a great question. The reasons given for graphics drivers not being open are quite reasonable and I will exclude that quality from that discussion. Many other devices are so basic that the driver is little more than a variation of the example code in the SDK (I'm considering Windows drivers here). Yet the manufacturers guard the source code for their version of the driver as they would if there was something really valuable in there. In some software the driver is just a simple layer between the application and the hardware, most of the implementation is in the application and the driver could be opened and still maintain compatibility with the application. At the same time users that are interested could be utilities or applications that improve what the user could do with the hardware.