Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet

You make it sound like the idea is "if you GPL your driver, we'll maintain it for you", which is kinda bullshit. For one, kernel devs only really maintain what they want to maintain. They'll do enough work to make it compile but they aren't going to go out of their way to test it. Regressions do happen. More importantly though, they very purposefully do no maintain any stability in the driver ABI. The policy is actively hostile to the concept of proprietary drivers.

Which is really kinda of hilarious considering that so much modern hardware requires proprietary firmware blobs to run.