Around a decade ago, I was introduced to a couple people who it turned out worked at nvidia. After a bunch of conversation, nouveau came up; they were intensely negative about it, mocking it and its developers, criticizing its existence, even, and declaring it would never amount to anything. (Meanwhile, I was running it on a computer at home and it was significantly more stable than the nvidia proprietary driver at the time, and performed well enough for my use.)

I wish I'd had more conversational courage at the time to "stand up" for nouveau with them; it was super rude to shit on someone else's hard work, especially when the reason why they had to do that hard work was because nvidia was a bunch of jerks with a shitty FOSS policy.