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Linux is not a side project. It has thousands of developers being paid by chip and hardware manufacturers to ensure that linux works on their products.

With the complexity of systems engineering, for a single driver, it takes months to build one from scratch. Plus, there is not enough expertise within the rust community to take on a project like the linux kernel to match the rate of development by many large corporations with hobbyists.

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It started as a side project.

They may not match the rate of upstream development, but doing their own thing is going to be a faster path to their goal of Rust in the kernel than trying to convince everyone else to do something that they don’t seem to want.

The goal is to make rust relevant to Linux raising its own importance and legitimacy. The value is at least in part political. It can't achieve that goal in a branch.

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