I'd much rather reverse engineer proprietary hardware; I get to have fun doing that and I get to play the upstreaming game better than any of those companies that "support open source" that you love so much (have you seen the mess AMD made? They have hundreds of megabytes of autogenerated headers in the Linux tree now!), while working with a team of motivated and experienced developers and working to make everyone's life as pleasant as possible, minimizing churn, red tape, and inefficiency.

Seriously, there's no way I'd be half as happy working at Intel on Linux drivers as I am working on the M1. And it's not like they support external developers either - most of the chip documentation for Intel/AMD stuff is not public. You can't actually build working graphics drivers from their public docs, not even remotely close. Heck, I had to reverse engineer AMD's GPU microcode to get the variant in the PS4 to work. Totally undocumented stuff.

I think other operating systems could also benefit from this reverse engineering work as it shows how to create the drivers needed.

If Apple had provided a bunch of binary blobs for Linux, that would have been great - for Linux only.

It will be ironic if the mac mini becomes the most open hardware platform for alternative systems.

I didn't even own any modern Apple hardware until last year. My rationale for supporting these machines is that they're awesome machines, better than anything with Intel/AMD chips, and people should be able to run Linux on them.

Of course, if that doesn't convince you, we can always fall on the fact that you aren't the person writing the code, and in the world of free software you don't get to tell others what they ought to spend their time on.

Well, they do run kooler and quieter than literally every x86 machine I've ever owned, yes ;)