I was referring to Morton's (and company's) attempt at banning binary blobs from being loaded into the Kernel. That is totally forcing an ideal on someone else. I didn't mean to accuse you of this (heinous) act; I just couldn't get off my soap box and I had to recap my argument. :p

How? They have absolutely no copyright over any of the code that nVidia provides, unless of course it has some stolen code within it, which I would love to see them try to prove. That's how the GPL was written; the author keeps the copyright over his portion of the code unless he specifically assigns the copyright to the FSF. So, nVidia holds the copyright to their code for their card driver, the FSF has not and will never hold the copyright for this code until nVidia assigns it to them, and it doesn't violate the Linux copyright since nVidia wrote their own original code for the drivers.

Security can be argued, but the chances of a security loophole (either accidental or on purpose) being put into some proprietary drivers are improbable, and the chance that a security researcher would miss it is fairly improbable too. If you don't want to use a binary blob, then don't. Nobody is forcing you to, so why do you want to force people to not use a binary blob?

The true issue here is that while Linux wants to grow and become more popular, half of the community wants to alienate people by pushing their ideals on others, which is what Linux, especially at the beginning of this decade, was never about. The FSF and GNU have become just as bad as Microsoft and Apple. Until the Linux community can work past that, it will continue to grow too slowly for it to surpass Microsoft or Apple.

Totally, and I think Ubuntu's approach is a wiser one both to educate people and keep freedom within Linux. I've been using Linux for 11 years now, and it seems each and every year the FSF wants to take more and more freedom from the user, specifically their freedom of choice. A great example was when in 2006 Morton and some other GNU/FSF pundits made a very big push to ban proprietary kernel modules by making the kernel refuse to load binary kernel modules. Thankfully Torvalds squashed the idea and essentially said "over my dead body". There is nothing wrong or newbish about using proprietary kernel drivers. I don't get why so many people make it like they're about to die because nVidia and AMD/ATi don't release their driver code... which is probably full of trade secrets. They have to keep proprietary to keep competitive.