You can see why Nouveau devs are having difficulties with Nvidia in a Xorg developer confereence talk[1].
1. Relations with NvidiaNVIDIA changes prevent us from releasing a driver
* Signed firmwares accessible publicly but not redistributable
* Reverse engineering of vbios impossible
2. Communication mostly down
* Main contact/dev left NVIDIA (Alexandre Courbot)
* Most important requests left unanswered...
* ... until more complete code than wanted lands publicly innvgpuweeks later
1. Relations with NvidiaNVIDIA changes prevent us from releasing a driver
2. Communication mostly down [1] https://www.x.org/wiki/Events/XDC2017/herbst_peres_nouveau.p...