Except no one professional would touch the leaked source with a 10 ft poll. Expect continued clean room reverse engineering or get sued.
But also, not everyone cares. See game modders who routinely use source code leaks to make game patches. I'm not talking about big companies that want nvidia would want to sue, but individuals and small groups, who are not a big enough target and would likely remain anonymous anyways.
If nvidia releases the drivers as source-available rather than open source that would still be incredibly useful since you can distribute patches. Their drivers are still missing basic features like fan speed control on headless machines.
I don't think you can distribute patches against proprietary source-available drivers, since modifying proprietary code is against copyright law.
It’s a polished turd, but at least it works which is more than I can say for nouveau
And yes you can distribute patches. Copyright only prevents you from distributing the modified version.
nouveau has been extremely stable for me when I used it up until last year.
Patches contain parts of the original code, so I would class them as modified versions of the original code. Also the initial modification isn't allowed either, I wasn't really referring to distribution of the patches, just creating them isn't allowed AFAIK.
OTOH, even the GPL is pretty much unenforceable these days, unless you are well funded enough to afford time consuming legal cases.
It's a clean-room engineering situation, if you've even looked at it you're legally contaminated and you're now a liability to the parent company/project's IP. And now those projects have to be hyper-aware of any contributors who might "sneak in" a bit of NVIDIA code that gets the whole project taken down.