If this were BSD, Alan Cox would have had his hard work stolen from him against his will, and he wouldn't have been able to do anything about it. Nvidia could have taken his code and released it in their binary blobs, and he'd never see any benefit from it again.
Yeah, he would never see any benefit from it. Except the fact that it would make the whole Linux system more viable, thus attracting more users, thus bringing in more people who don't have the sub-licensing issues that nvidia does and may choose to contribute.
I also love the over-the-top language GPL advocates always use: "Alan Cox would have his hard work stolen from him against his will..." Yeah... his hard work is absolutely stolen. Oh wait, I thought we can't call copyright infringement stealing since it actually doesn't take anything away from the copyright owner. It's actually even more ridiculous in this situation since Alan gives away his code for free (as in beer) anyway, whereas a digital music file or video actually has a price.
Fortunately, the trend for new software is to be licensed more openly (usually the apache or MIT license). People are figuring out that the GPL actually doesn't promote return code contributions nearly as well as it was supposed to, and it brings a whole host of complicated compatibility concerns with other open source licenses.
The GPL can be a useful license for businesses in some cases, but it really sucks as a general-purpose open source (or "free" software) license, and not just because of the distribution issues with "evil" corporations but also for end-users who miss out on better software that is the result of proprietary-friendly open source licenses. Stallman has really done a disservice to the software/computer industry by getting so many sheep to believe in his religious ideology, so let me be at least one voice saying the truth: Your computer is more useful when open source and proprietary software work together. Screaming "proprietary software is always and unequivocally evil" was never helpful, and people are awakening to the realization of how ridiculously false that notion is.