Mark Shuttleworth's clarification on Feisty’s proprietary drivers:
"We define “essential hardware” as functionality which exists widely and for which there are free software applications that are broadly useful and which take advantage of that hardware. The canonical example has always been wifi drivers, some of which only come in proprietary blobs, but which of course enable huge parts of the free software stack to Just Work. We have always shipped those, and intend to continue to do so."