NVIDIA, in its desire to stop third parties making hacks to its firmware to enable higher-end features on lower-end hardware, is moving to requiring signed firmware on its newer cards. Some promises made to the Nouveau project (which is developing open-source drivers for NVIDIA cards) have yet to eventuate, leaving them unable to take advantage of features of these cards.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-Unfriendly-OSS-Hardware

Somebody desperately trying to protect their market...

Cheers, Peter