That's not what I meant. Hardware manufacturers often cite their chip design as a reason for why they don't release their driver software. Someone could reverse engineer the functions of the software and see what the hardware does, then replicate it.

Especially for proprietary tech like RTX, DLSS and G-Sync (which are more and more becoming FOSS anyway, e.g. FSR and Freesync 2.0), the chip makers fear they might lose the miniscule competitive advantage they gain by obscuring their code.