The sad story of the em28xx driver

If you are abusing developers's and users's trust it becomes suddenly much harder to integrate code in kernel. Take look on the story with Reiserfs and Reiser4: Hans promised to work with the community on Reiserfs and so after long deliberation it was included in kernel. After few years he started to close bugs and feature requests with "use reiser4" (effectively abandoning users) and stopped reiserfs support (when something went wring he pointed out that the same thing worked perfectly with previous version of kernel and basically refused to debug and fix problems thus abandoning developers). This made inclusion of reiser4 more-or-less impossible: since it was pretty clear that reiser4 will be abandoned once it'll be included all problems which usually don't act as merge blockers (because kernel developers know they can be fixed later) were declared as such (because it was not clear if Hans and his command will try to fix them after merge and history showed that he'll probably not bother).

And in most cases newer drivers support more hardware, not less. Kernel developers are quite reluctant to include driver which works on subset of hardware just because driver developer is not interested with community work. If there are technical reasons to have two drivers it's Ok, but if the reasons are political... it's different story. Multiple drivers are easily accepted as temporary solution, but then someone must merge support for other hardware - and then we have "reiserfs situation" where developer works for it's own feature and against all others...