[brady67ten]

> Of course, the big if there is: Can you reach the critical mass of drivers without the project exhausting itself.

If that were the case, we wouldn't find ourselves in the current quagmire that we're in. Linux kernel already had a huge number of devices supporting it.

The truth is, there is nothing stopping device vendors from releasing a device driver for a specific version, maintaining it for an year or two and then abandoning it. The better approach would be to figure out a stable interface layer for kernel drivers so that you can simply plug and play the vendor supplied device driver.