>   Taken to its logical conclusion, you should also avoid any
>   piece of hardware with onboard firmware which is not open
>   sourced... so, thats most SCSI cards, video cards, wireless
>   cards... don't forget the PC BIOS...

Work is underway to design an open video card.

A couple of my biggest headaches in the last year are from
buggy firmware.  One of these is a very high quality non-BIOS
firmware.  But all it takes is one nasty bug to ruin your
day/month/year.

Word is that Tyan may switch to LinuxBIOS.  But IIUC, NetBSD
can't run on LinuxBIOS?  Does NetBSD make BIOS calls?  If so,
what would it take to remove them?