Comment by ordu

> But why are all drivers expected to be "part of the project"? We don't treat userspace Linux software that way.

It is the policy of linux development at work. Linux kernel doesn't break userspace, you could safely upgrade kernel, your userspace would work nice. But Linux kernel breaks inner APIs easily, and kernel developers take responsibility for all the code. So if a patch in memory management subsystem broke some drivers, kernel developers would find breakages and fix them.

> We don't consider Windows drivers part of Windows.

Yeah, because Windows kernel less frequently breaks backward compatibility in kernel space, and because hardware vendors are ready to maintain drivers for Windows.