News from the staging tree

But if you pay attention to the 2nd half of the quote, it implies an expectation on the part of the releaser, that's the complaint. In other words, no one is complaining that a company released code, they are complaining that certain companies release code and expect it to make it into mainline so that this same company can later benefit from this code being in mainline for future projects (note the: "it's required on all new systems").

This requires a two way interactive model; as others have pointed out, that seems to be the point of the staging tree. The kernel devs do NOT expect the companies to do all the work on their own (that's why it goes in the staging tree, to get kernel devs involved). But this also means that the kernel devs have not yet taken up maintainership of the code since it is not yet in mainline. They expect the company to be involved working with the devs to bring it up to par. Once it is up to par, I suspect that it is more acceptable to rely on the kernel devs to keep it up to date with the changing mainline kernel, but not before.