I personally don't have problems with developers having kernel access. I can't imagine any open source OS fan objecting to this. I do have problems with MS or

I personally don't have problems with developers having kernel access. I can't imagine any open source OS fan objecting to this. I do have problems with MS or any other vendor using kernel access unnecessarily. MS Paint should not run in the kernel. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. The question is whether MS or any other vendor could provide the feature set their product enjoys without running in the kernel. If Windows offered anything like eBPF but MS security apps chose to run in-kernel instead of through eBPF, then MS should be forced to give competitors the same kernel access. If MS would play fair and restrict their non-OS teams to userspace they wouldn't have to play fair by providing access to kernelspace. The argument is that it is impossible for MS non-OS teams to play in userspace because MS doesn't provide the APIs to make it possible. It seems that some other OSes might not suffer from this deficiency.