Quote: Solaris and AIX manage to have very stable kernel ABIs.
Granted I failed to notice that he specifically mentioned Solaris/AIX and as such assumed the discussion was still that of Windows <-> Linux. But again, it's not that Linux devs can't 'manage' stable kernel ABI's, they don't want to. They don't want to support proprietary out of tree drivers at all, if someone else wants to maintain such drivers and keep them up to date then fine but that's on them. And judging by the vast amount of hardware Linux supports this is working just fine. Even companies like NVidia which refuse to open source their drivers maintains a proprietary driver for Linux.
Quote: Once again, read the fucking post you replied to: it's assumed the driver is open-source but that doesn't magically create maintainers for it
Where is it 'assumed' that the driver is open source? Also the developers doesn't have to have the hardware in order to keep it compiling against the current kernel abi/api.
And if it was an open source driver then if a user really relied on the hardware (which could be the case as Vas Crabb stated it was some _expensive_ specialist hardware) he/she could hire someone to maintain it and make it work against new driver interfaces even on Windows when it's driver interface changes (and it will change again).
Quote: As long as Linux fans ignore the problems, they won't be solved.
What problems? Drivers? Again Linux supports more hardware out-of-the box than any system, it supports more hardware than Solaris/AIX ever will, and despite it's stable kernel abi Solaris and other big iron *nix continue to fade into obscurity, even it's current owners Oracle are now pushing their 'Unbreakable Linux' solution and developing btrfs for Linux and IBM has invested more than a billion into Linux development.
Linux has no stable driver abi/api, yet it enjoys vastly more driver support than any other *nix which has more stable abi's like the BSD's and Solaris, but you still maintain that this is some big problem for Linux? Really?