Probably because they don't know the difference between kernel and
user space. Kinda understandable when you come from a Mac or Windows
background, where (in the former) there is no distinction or (in the
latter) it's so blurred as to make little difference.
And if they *do* understand it, from a dispassionate point of view,
it does seem to make sense to put graphics drivers in the kernel -
they're implemented as "device drivers" in every other desktop OS.
Except MacOS X, where's it's an application layer like glibc, but
nobody understand OS X yet beyond the hardest of developers.
But they don't realise that XFree86 has an *enormous* amount of
developer time behind it, which would need to be duplicated to make
it work in kernel space with full backwards compatibility. Oh, and
did I mention this would all be for one platform - XFree86 is
designed to run on many! It would also bloat the kernel tremendously.
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