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Why do you think it has anything to do with the hardware vendors? They don't want to spend resources upstreaming their changes, but do something else, that's all. Did not we just see a fight last year, between, I think, AMD and Linux, where AMD, instead of the common practice to drop a blob and be done with it, tried to actually upstream some drivers, but they were not up to Linux's coding standards, so got rejected. I am not saying AMD is in right here. Maybe nobody is, given the current state of affairs. But it is end users who are suffering from the conflict of interest between Linux community, who doesn't want to maintain cheaply written code, and hardware companies, who can't make great open source drivers for the same money they can make an OK-ishly made closed source blob, that only supports 2yo LTS. That decision, that I can't have the latest Linux and 5yo drivers that work is simply bad for me as a consumer. Heck, if Linux had stable driver API, somebody could easily go and fix that just slightly buggy AMD driver to be compatible with the latest kernel without much fuss, and without the need to upstream it. And I could use my laptop with the supported kernel again. I think stable driver API for Linux would do a great good to billions of people. Would let them not to spend money every 3 years on a new phone, and let Microsoft to let Windows 10 go, finally bringing proper privacy to the common folk. |