Inducing others into the trap

It seems that not only do some wish to repaint the walls of their house or move said walls as they see fit, but they also want to (figuratively) recoat the inside of their hot water tank or reconfigure the internals of the gas valve on the furnace.

At some point we reach a practical limit of what we have the resources to do. And while I cheer Free drivers/firmware, removing the firmware blobs without a suitable replacement at hand (such as MadWifi's HAL sticking around until ath5k was capable) seems Quixotic to me. OTOH, a project such as this could only be born as a result of the incredible success of Free Software over the past almost 20 years.