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>as an effort to make the cost of keeping drivers closed-source high

I don't think it is intentional. Linux development is very pragmatic, they just want to have freedom to refactor anything without caring about stable kernel APIs.

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Ironically, they care a lot about stability towards user space interfaces, to the point that bugs become features if someone depends on them, but they don't care about driver interfaces being stable.

This seems like a win-win. The kernel developers are free to refactor as they need to keep the quality and velocity high and companies are incentivized to upstream patches including making drivers in-kernel.

It's somewhat pragmatic for the Linux developers. Support a stable kernel API probably wouldn't be that expensive. It's clearly a political decision against writing close source code that does anything low level.

How is it clear?

I am not sure why the comment is being downvoted - thats exactly what it is, a political decision to force companies to produce open drivers.

Because of this unsubstantiated and baseless claim:

> Support a stable kernel API probably wouldn't be that expensive

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