@art There was a good reason for the GPL drivers back in the heady days of Linux.
They worked!
Chances are, proprietary drivers then worked only on a single kernel in a specific configuration (sometimes on a specific distribution .. remember the libc6 changeover?) Everything else was a crud-shoot.
Remember Winmodems and scanners? You were lucky to get them working at all.
Now, professionally, I've seen proprietary drivers in all sorts of places, working fine.
nVidia drivers always worked.
@art I don't think you were wrong, and I don't think you're wrong now either. Your priorities changed, that's all.