@kirby >Sometimes they provide proprietary blobs. But those are a separate package entirely.
I would argue against the concept that the proprietary software in "linux-firmware" is a separate package entirely, as it's updated in lockstep and many of the drivers won't function unless they can talk to the proprietary software.

I would argue a massive derivative work is created and therefore the corporations need to provide the source code under the GPLv2, but unfortunately the Linux developers are too spineless to demand freedom.