"reverse engineering or writing drivers"
When I encountered Linux I was already too old to be interested in that kind of things. But I did disassemble C/PM code. I was interested in blue boxing, cracking of games, infinite life reverse engineering and hacking in the 80s though.
"For the purposes of this discussion they are equivalent."
Again it feels like you made some assumptions about me and what I wanted to say which are just that, assumptions.