Reverse engineering: more than NVIDIA deserves?

See, I have to disagree about this is "rewarding" NVIDIA or hurting other 
projects.  It's the old "scratch an itch" thing: a group of people like 
the NVIDIA hardware and wanted a free driver so they're working on it.  
Eight people out of the entire community isn't really a resource suck that 
I see hurting Intel and ATI video cards.  People are free to start their 
own projects to try to get more people to work on Intel and ATI hardware.  

I think that what's actually helped NVIDIA to get the interest that it 
does in the community is that it provided binary-only drivers that 
actually WORKED.  Yes, this is an odd situation, but for years they had 
the only cards with almost identical 3D acceleration as Windows, while ATI 
kept putting out that joking monstrosity that they called drivers.  Thus 
more people in the community bought NVIDIA hardware and so it got a large 
user base.  Then comes Nouveau which is doing a great job at making 
totally open drivers since there was a critical mass in the community.  I 
think that a large number of users annoyed with the binary only driver is 
what brought this about.

Linux has more open drivers than any other OS because people decided to 
write free drivers to scratch their own itch.  If we end up with open 
drivers that make the NVIDIA cards work as well as the binary drivers do, 
so what?  People are free to buy whatever hardware they want, and it's 
never a bad thing to have drivers out there.  Besides, instead of spending 
time and energy being grumpy and saying it's rewarding NVIDIA and we 
shouldn't do it, I think we as a community should be proud that these 
eight developers are making an open driver in spite of the lack of 
documentation and corporate help.  To me that says a lot about what's 
often criticized as a group of non-professional hackers from the 
Internets ;)