"There's a lot of controversy over whether a Free Software operating system should include binary-only drivers. Arguments on both sides range from the philosophical to the practical, all of which are worth examining.
"Before we look at whether there should be binary drivers in a free OS, it’s worth looking at what exists at the moment. The most hard-line platform in this area is OpenBSD, which flatly refuses to allow binary blobs in kernelspace, citing reliability and security concerns. FreeBSD is a different matter; it includes some binary drivers for things like RAID chipsets in the base system..."
