As to the blobbed drivers, is it better to fail early when there are options or later after you have committed? Makes a good open question.
Better not to run at all if it is wrong and not design properly. This way, you don't waist many days trying to figure it out, or worst, loose very valuable data.
Not sure that your question was, is it OK to run BLOB. The answer is simple. NO BLOB at all!
I posted an example of miss use or borderline legal use of BLOB in commercial software a few days ago. Is that what you want? Sure is not what I want!
If it needs BLOB to work, then that's the wrong hardware pick period! There is choices, pick something else.
