If the jail cell is as comfortable as the unlocked room, there is absolutely no difference—until you try to leave. Any sane distribution should come with built binary blobs—and an option to rebuild them at will. But forcing you to build everything from scratch is pedantically impractical. But what do I know, I only do this on regular basis at work!
Binary blobs are not the same as binary packages having source readily available. I see that pmoriarty appears to be misusing the term, I was responding to your comment without having closely read his.
