[Freak_NL]

Out of the three common GPU brands found in computers nowadays, Intel's integrated GPUs have mostly been a very pleasant experience for the end user when installing any GNU/Linux distribution. It just works without any additional work.

If AMD manages to reach that level of out-of-the-box working graphics driver, that will definitely reflect positively on their brand of graphics cards, and might give them an advantage over Nvidia.

I suspect that working with the kernel developers and maintainers will also be beneficial to the driver itself. It seems to me that for cooperating you gain valuable feedback on your code from people well-versed in kernel and driver code.