An Nvidia spokesman said that it has taken a long time for this to happen and he was sorry it took so long. 

According to Phoronix  the whole thing has been a fiasco. The lack of driver signing held up the open-source Linux driver from supporting hardware acceleration on Nvidia's latest generation GPUs.

With Pascal only a few months away Nvidia had not got Maxwell to move on with open-source 3D.  Nvidia's only saving grace is that its official, proprietary Linux driver continues working quite well.

This time taking the firmware to be signed  led Nouveau developers to call the Maxwell GPUs "VERY Open-Source Unfriendly".

Firmware blobs have bee signed for the GM200 and GM204, which isin a separate Git repository but will be merged into linux-firmware once all the DRM driver code is ready.

There is also the "secboot" code for Nouveau that provides the pieces to the open-source kernel driver for being able to load the signed firmware.

Of course this does not mean that there is working open-source 3D for the GTX 900 series, but the necessary enablement should mean that it can working soon.

"the changes for basic support are rather modest, and hopefully this pre-release will be enough to enable patches to land in Mesa."

Nouveau developers should get of this code prepped and landed in the Linux 4.6 kernel cycle.