My take is that when I buy hardware from a company I expect them to supply me with working drivers if such drivers exists for my preferred operating system.
So if I buy a VIA mother board I expect the CD with drivers to come with it, for all operating systems they have a driver for.
I don't really care if the driver is completely open source or not as long as it works for my purchased product, accompanies the product and is made available to download.
Hmmmm, I guess it's just like the nvidia drivers.
I buy nvidia because of their support for my operating system.