How not to recognize free hardware

You picked a less than ideal example there, because Debian has BSD-kerneled variants too: http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/ (which I believe is due to be a fully-supported port in the upcoming Squeeze release). So substitue almost any other Linux distro to make the point whilst avoiding quibblers.

But I take your point, and agree with you that it seems to make little sense.