Wow, I had no idea mentioning Linux here would touch off such a firestorm. I want to address a couple things here and then follow up with comments regarding what I was talking about and responded to earlier.
Aiden:
I'm going to start off by saying I haven't done any Linux server management myself, so as of this moment, on a personal basis, I have to plead ignorance. However, if my experience as sort of my own "desktop admin" is any guide, I'm sorry but I can't help but feeling something is not quite right in what your experiences have been. I will look into your comments and, if I can find anything insightful or useful for you, I will relay it to you, either in a public thread or via PM.
Ubuntu OOB Support:
Maybe this has already been bludgeoned to death up-thread, but I think certain things bear repeating, just to ensure they are absolutely crystal clear. GNU/Linux as an OS is an open-source platform. In it's purest form (and purity where the rubber meets the road does vary from distro to distro, depending on their priorities) a GNU/Linux system has nothing on it that's proprietary in nature. This is absolutely the case in Debian and Fedora, for instance, and slightly less so (but not that much less) in Ubuntu, which is based on Debian. This is a mix of philosophical, ethical, legal and practical issues, all of which collectively are beyond the scope of this thread or, arguably, most non-Linux message boards. Therefore, I will not entertain nor will I respond to comments based on the notion of mere personal (dis)agreement. I'm not discussing opinion here, not mine nor anyone elses'.
Some distros allow a relatively few non-free pieces of software into their system where there is absolutely no practical alternative and for those things which are basically mission-critical. That's their deciding factor. Anything else, no matter how critical, will not prevent the install from functioning, and so at that point anything else that's non-free will not be included, period. Mark Shuttleworth's goal, and that of Canonical, and therefore "and that of Ubuntu" is to encourage the common and open development of all software, be they applications, codecs, hardware drivers, or anything else. He and other like-minded members of the F/OSS movement hold the tactical and strategic view (this is generalizing, but reasonably accurate) that just packing their distros (or Linux in general) full of closed-source drivers decreases the incentive for the development of open-source versions, or of open standards-based solutions. What or how much or on what basis gets included is, as I mentioned above, strictly a decision of any given distro.
Looking at this not from a high-and-mighty position but from a more practical standpoint, I totally understand how it can be frustrating for someone who simply doesn't have a clue about such things to toss a distro on their system and become frustrated because all their video and audio files, etc., don't "just work" right out of the box. Absolutely, I "get it". I'll go you one step further and even say I can see how you might feel, could you step out of yourself and step back far enough to look at the whole situation, like you're some kind of pawn caught up in someone elses' war. Again, it's beyond the scope of MacRumors to really discuss and debate this, and as it is I've already hijacked this thread from the original discussion far enough and long enough, I want to conclude what I've started here and get us back on-topic as quickly as possible
All of that being said, the practical resolution to such issues is to go into, in the case of Ubuntu, the Synaptic Package Manager, do a search for "DVD" or "MP3", etc., find the packages marked "non-free" and/or "ugly" and then simply install them. In the case of your video card, Ubuntu will actually let you know there's an available non-free driver to fully support it, and "Would you like to install it anyway even though it's non-free?" Tell it go ahead, then eventually reboot, and you're golden.
Alright, now finally (since I'd rather make this one post and not several successive ones), let me as briefly as possible get to what I was interested in responding to in the first place.
Apple would benefit from incorporating F/OSS drivers (with appropriate GPL compliance, of course!) simply because they are open to inspection, require no fees paid or NDAs signed, and Apple doesn't have to worry that they'll be the only ones who can do anything with them. The whole concept behind F/OSS drivers is that you get massively peer-reviewed code, which should be desireable in any situation. I mean, if you can have a driver that 1000 people have looked at instead of, say, 50, the it's probably likely to be more stable, have better implimentation of features, and so on.
