What's so bad about it? Windows to this day doesn't have FOSS drivers as standard and despite that is pretty successful. In practice, as long as a driver works it's fine for the vast majority of users, and you can always disassemble and binary-patch if really needed.

(it's not obvious that having to occasionally disassemble/patch closed-source drivers is worse than the collective effort wasted trying to get every single thing in the kernel and keep it up to date).

I would actually posture that making it easier to make drivers would actually have the opposite effect and result in more FOSS drivers.

>FreeBSD (which is often invoked in these complaints) would have amdgpu for example.

In such a hypothetical FreeBSD could reimplement the stable API of Linux.

No, every gpu vendor out there would prefer proprietary drivers and with a stable ABI, they could do it, and would do, there is no question about it.

I worked for HP on storage drivers for a decade or so, and had their been a stable ABI, HP would have shipped proprietary storage drivers for everything. Even without a stable ABI, they shipped proprietary drivers at considerable effort, compiling for myriad different distro kernels. It was a nightmare, and good thing too, or there wouldn't be any open source drivers.

I never said they wouldn't. Having more and better drivers is a good thing for Linux users. It's okay for proprietary drivers to exist. The kernel isn't meant to be a vehicle to push the free software agenda.

> In such a hypothetical FreeBSD could reimplement the stable API of Linux.

Like it does with the userland API of Linux, which is stable:

* https://wiki.freebsd.org/Linuxulator

It's plenty easy to make drivers now, it's just hard to distribute them without sharing the source.

There is absolutely no good reason not to share driver source though so that's a terrible use case to optimize for.