I'm cautiously optimistic. While I could see NVIDIA hiring him to stifle nouveau development, it doesn't really seem worth it when he already quit as maintainer and Red Hat is already working on nova, a replacement for nouveau. I got into Linux with Ubuntu 6.06 and remember the situation then. NVIDIA and ATI both had proprietary drivers and little open source support, at least for their most recent chipsets of the time. I was planning on building a new PC and going with an NVIDIA card because ATI's drivers were the hottest of garbage and I had a dreadful experience going from a GeForce 4 MX420 to a Radeon X1600Pro. However, when AMD acquired ATI they released a bunch of documentation. They didn't immediately start paying people to write FOSS Radeon drivers, but the community (including third party commercial contributors) started writing drivers from these documents. Radeon support quickly got way better. Only after there was a good foundation in place do I remember seeing news about official AMD funded contributors to the Mesa drivers. I hope that's what we're now seeing with NVIDIA. They released "documentation" in the form of their open kernel modules for their proprietary userspace as well as reworking features into GSP to make them easier to access, and now that the community supported driver is maturing the see it viable enough to directly contribute to.

I think the same may have happened with Freedreno and Panfrost projects too.

This is my cautious optimism here. I hope they follow this path like the others and not use this to stifle the nouveau project. Besides, stifling one nouveau dev would mean no other nouveau/nova/mesa devs would accept future offers from them. They can't shut down the open driver at this point, and the GSP changes seem like they purposely enabled this work to begin with. They could've just kept the firmware locked down and nouveau would've stayed essentially dead indefinitely.