Read on
> it's proprietory
Yes indeed, proprietary
> Now I'm hooked
There you go.
> I wish there was an open alternative
So does the rest of the industry.
Specifically, it forces you to run your stuff on NVidia hardware and gives you exactly zero guarantee of future support.
Good luck trying to reproduce whatever research you are currently conducting in 10 years time.
Vendor lock-in + no forward compatibility guarantee = surefire recipe for getting milked to the bone by NVidia.