If you care about more than the short term, such "political status of the code" should matter to you. The purpose of the GPL is not (or should not be) being able to say "my code is holier than yours", nor necessarily about having the best working implementation.
No, its main purpose is guaranteeing that all users can understand how the device works, even if they don't belong to the company that builds it. Other FLOSS licenses don't guarantee that in the same way than the GPL does, as they allow modifications to be kept secret. We could say that the GPL is "knowledge-friendly".
In the case of video cards, the alternative would be having only the proprietary closed driver and no open source version. It's incredibly hard to know of such closed systems work by reverse-engineering them; an open source driver, even if limited and less perfect, provides a full specification of the device.
No, its main purpose is guaranteeing that all users can understand how the device works, even if they don't belong to the company that builds it. Other FLOSS licenses don't guarantee that in the same way than the GPL does, as they allow modifications to be kept secret. We could say that the GPL is "knowledge-friendly".
In the case of video cards, the alternative would be having only the proprietary closed driver and no open source version. It's incredibly hard to know of such closed systems work by reverse-engineering them; an open source driver, even if limited and less perfect, provides a full specification of the device.