FreeBSD dev dishing out Linux processes in 2021. Some things never change I guess ;)
But honestly, Drew, all serious vendors of networking hardware have fully functional upstream drivers and good relationships with Jakub and Dave. However, one can't just throw mess of a code to netdev and expected it to be accepted as-is because they are a big vendor or something. Which I believe is good for users!
I'm still peeved at what happened to my company around ~2006 or so which resulted in the exact same situation in the article.
In my case: Company A submits a driver with a feature in their driver that basically triples performance for our class of device. It was implemented in a horrific, unreadable way. Companies B and C (mine) each independently re-implement that feature in a less crazy, far more readable and maintainable way. Company B gets their driver accepted with this feature (I think it was part of the initial submission). We get ours NACKed and are told to implement it for the entire kernel. This would be fine, I suppose, if companies A and B were also required to remove the feature and help implement it, but they weren't.
This might not have been such a big deal if we had been a big company. However, we had 1 dev (me) doing drivers and support for Linux, Solaris, OSX, FreeBSD, ESX, etc. So in the short term, management directed that we have customers ignore the driver in the kernel and use the one from our website so we didn't have to stop development on other OSes to implement this feature for our competition. This feature was eventually implemented in a generic way (with my help), but for several kernel releases the driver on our website outperformed the in-kernel driver by a factor of 3 or more.
FWIW, FreeBSD had no problem with the feature, and another driver author eventually ported it out of my driver into a general layer where it still exists to this day, and is used by almost every driver in the OS.
Sorry this happened to you. I'm not maintainer and hadn't been around 15 years ago, but I think these days it would be much harder to sneak in some feature in unreadable code piece with initial driver submission. The whole driver would probably be NACKed. Don't know if it makes netdev more or less confrontational from you point of view though :)
But honestly, Drew, all serious vendors of networking hardware have fully functional upstream drivers and good relationships with Jakub and Dave. However, one can't just throw mess of a code to netdev and expected it to be accepted as-is because they are a big vendor or something. Which I believe is good for users!