I've worked extensively with proprietary drivers in Linux and other OS environments. If you take a pure technical point A to B view of the world, there is littl

I've worked extensively with proprietary drivers in Linux and other OS environments. If you take a pure technical point A to B view of the world, there is little doubt that you should be able to develop better drivers in an open source environment, at least in the long term. McCarthyism feels like an uncomfortable or inappropriate analogy, but one area where 'open-sourcists' are often utterly unhelpful is the plain business fact that proprietary stacks are commonly implemented for multiple operating systems. If we tried to tie this to the McCarthyist analogy I suppose this issue is like trying to explain that you believe in the redistribution of wealth whilst trying to prove you're not a communist (it is a weird analogy for a corporatist isn't it?). The long and the short of it is that hardware vendors are trying to do the best by their customers, not always in the right way, and uncompromising zealotry and isolated focus on Linux doesn't help.