I understand the reasoning, if you wish to compete against commercially available software *cough* Microsoft *cough*. You need to provide a product that works as well as (if not better) than the competition. Should you use the proprietary software (I'm not talking about just firmware but also things like flash, etc). I just don't know. Would Ubuntu be as big as it is now if it didn't use proprietary? Would Microsoft see a loss of market share if there wasn't a (in the average user's perspective I am not talking slashdotters here) viable alternative?