That's some near-totalitarian level of power. AMD is perfectly within their rights and abilities to ship an out-of-tree driver. As I understand it, DKMS exists

That's some near-totalitarian level of power. AMD is perfectly within their rights and abilities to ship an out-of-tree driver. As I understand it, DKMS exists to make that use case easier for end users. The popular consumer-facing distros would probably make it easy as dirt to install too. The difference between that and upstreaming into the kernel is primarily shifting some of the the maintenance burden onto the kernel developers. That comes with the condition of adding stakeholders to the driver design, not just using them as a code dumping ground. "Totalitarian" seems a bit over the top.