Hi,
> Currently we're crippling our user experience by refusing
> to ship drivers support this hardware even though there are
> fully open drivers to support these.
And that's the problem. This happens all the time with kernel
drivers, everyone wants the end result of a driver but the
work to actually make it sustainable never gets done. Unless
a driver is actually merged in the upstream kernel, it's not
going to work in the long term.
I'd say it is fine to include out-of-tree drivers in case there is
(a) is someone maintaining the patches (which Hans promised to do
here), and
(b) there is a plan for upstream supporting the hardware, so we
don't end up maintaining these patches forever.
And IMO both "someone actively works on upstreaming the driver" and
"support for this hardware will be added to another driver (such as
rtl8xxxu)" are good as upstream plan.
cheers,
Gerd