[msandford]

Great point! Microsoft does require something similar. You _only get to use the APIs they provide_ which absolutely means that you don't get to write kernel patches to change the source of the kernel to invent new APIs which you want to use to write drivers for your product. So yeah, Microsoft does exactly this.

It's not as though if AMD had developed drivers for Linux first that they could then go bully MS into allowing them to patch the Windows kernel so that they didn't have to modify their Linux drivers to get them ported to Windows.