Possibly offtopic : Binary only driver

[Alan Cox]

> > Vendors do recognize the trade off. RHEL3 has a fixed ABI as best we can
> > manage it, but its a hard job.
> 
> It's not really fixed. It's just that RHEL revs less often. The next rev
> will still be incompatible with the previous.

The ABI is currently maintained across quarterly revisions too with RHEL3.
So its more akin to the Windows world were 95 broke everything, NT needed
new drivers and so on.