Which is insane if you think about it. 20 year old NICs are still supported by the kernel. Hardware drivers should be GPLd, no ifs and no buts. As if having closed source drivers gave OEMs a competitive advantage, it's basically all for planned obsolescence

I believe the hardware drivers usually are GPL, the problem is that they are... at best, they are downstream patches that require ongoing work to port to newer kernel versions (since Linux doesn't do stable ABIs or APIs for drivers).