Apparently Feisty is going to ship binary drivers by default. That burning effect everybody was apparently commenting about in Beryl? That was a brilliant opportunity being burned away. The opportunity to win truly free drivers. ATI/AMD are only going to release free drivers if it is in their economic best interest. If the most high profile distro decides that binary is "free enough", this seriously hurts anybody advocating it being open source, both in and outside ATI/AMD.

Why listen to me? I work for a company that has created a great deal of closed source stuff on top of Linux, including a fairly nice multiseat X server. Currently that X server is in multiverse (package is desktop-multiplier), rightly so. I hammer away at our managment, explaining that we won't get anywhere in the Linux community without it being open source. What if Ubuntu decided to use our server instead of upstream X? I would look like a complete fool to company management, because I was clearly misleading them. Efforts to get it open sourced would be seriously compromised by my loss of credibility. I suspect that is exactly what is going to happen with Feisty with the ATI/Nvidia drivers.

Please, lets reconsider this. Lets make a public statement, clearly telling ATI/AMD and Nvidia that we value Freedom over any shiny cubes or fancy bling. Lets support those brave people within ATI/AMD that are helping get us specs, not shoot them in the back right on the finish line.