Comment 23 for bug 106434

daimoni:
Hmm. I am seeing not similar behaviour in another bug. Could you attach:
/etc/modprobe.d/lrm-video
please?

Re GPL patches:
It's not quite as clear cut as that. The GPL-only patches were introduced years ago to help discourage people from (accidentally or otherwise) abusing kernel interfaces which would then create derivative kernel modules. Linus isn't "anti-GPL" but nor does he want to ban modules that aren't derived from Linux (see http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/475654/focus=475824 ). I suspect that in later updates the NVIDIA driver will stop using those interfaces (so this is something that NVIDIA will fix) because the nvidia drivers distributed by Ubuntu seemingly do not have this problem.

Since you are retrieving the drivers from NVIDIA, I think there's an strong argument saying that NVIDIA should have had a note about this - after all you downloaded the driver from them and there's nothing Ubuntu can do to stop you downloading any other arbitrary driver and then running into problems compiling it. You're free to do what you like with your system but doing certain things will change who and where you can get support/help from...