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There are way too many devices where the hardware manufacturer is the sole supplier of the driver.

Exactly. This is complete nonsense. How can you have proprietary hardware and no proprietary drivers? What is everyone suppose to do? Stop inovating and sit around waiting for someone else to make a new industry standard? To make all their stuff open source? Screw that.
There is a place for propriatary drivers and there is a place for plug and play simplicty.

This isn’t quite fair - but there is a large grain of sanity in your point of view. I’ve actually delved into writing a Linux device driver. It is NOT for the faint of heart. It is a non-trivial task.

It would be NICE if companies didn’t use proprietary drivers. There are MANY applications where there isn’t a good reason to make the driver proprietary. If the specs of your hardware are already public - which is many times the case, then making the device driver proprietary doesn’t make sense. If you say hardware is never exposed this way - not so. Even the original PC had the entire register set (and roms) published.

However - there can be both competitive and legal reasons why you keep something proprietary. The easiest LEGAL reason to explain is one for a WiFi interface. These have radios in them. Radios that are programmable are a scary thing to groups like FCC. There are legal restrictions on how much power the radio can put out, and this varies with jurisdiction. So a proprietary driver is mandatory from the companies point of view (and the government!)

Certainly - if you have a newfangled piece of hardware that you want to keep secret, yet you want to sell it, then publishing a proprietary driver only makes sense.

Now it comes down to how many different drivers are you going to build, i.e. what OS’s are you going to support? This is the REAL problem for the company.

Ignore the Open Source Zealots - they don’t live in the real world on this topic (I’m an nomrally one of them..one of them...)