Your comment is unfair. I have contributed tons of things to the FreeBSD kernel, and to the Asterisk project, following the process that each organization uses. Some of my code (the qfq scheduler) has also been integrated in Linux by third parties who were motivated enough to carry on the work. The problem is not us being academics, but rather that there are only so many hours in a day. Some help from people more involved in "the process" would certainly be welcome.
Note that the netmap code is fairly small and self contained. It is meant to run on multiple platforms though, and I'd rather have it this ways than have to maintain two separate version. It is only thanks to this feature that i could develop VALE on FreeBSD and have it running on Linux in a matter of minutes.