> Partnering with a hardware vendor inevitably means closed source, deviations from upstream and ultimately a much larger hurdle to be a good citizen to the ope

> Partnering with a hardware vendor inevitably means closed source, deviations from upstream and ultimately a much larger hurdle to be a good citizen to the open-source community. No, it absolutely doesn't "automatically" mean that. You can totally request some major hardware vendors to fully upstream hardware offload capabilities in their Linux drivers.