Quoth Nikola Pavlović, on freebsd-questions:

Most of the time when a blob is necessary and nonexistant it's the case of
a vendor being lazy or incompetent.  Or they just sell mass market junk
hardware and are only interested in Windows no matter what you do.

Some printer vendors are perfect examples of retarded--printers don't even
need a kernel space driver, or at least shouldn't need one, all that is
required is a filter you can plug into pretty much standardized Unix
printing schemes; hell, even Apple insists that printers have no place
inside the kernel.  If they are such bottom feeders that they are
incapable of making a program to convert Postscript input to their
stupid proprietary control language, I'm afraid there's not much FreeBSD
can do about that.