Cred, yes. Easy passage through an airport checkpoint, not so much.

Modern IDEs do quite a bit these days beyond just organizing files and giving you a color coded editor. Between parsing your code as you write it, context-sensitive auto-complete, and dynamic recompilation of the files you're changing, there's plenty of things for it to do to try and make your life easier as a developer.

You win again, Heisenberg!

While that is an interesting argument, there are a few fundamental problems that bother me:

a) The incentive of manufacturers to release said specifications is low. Regardless of money made on the acquisition of a wider user base (often through more hardware sales), such specifications create issues for intellectual property and often serve as an opportunity for any competing manufacturers to digest a well-prepared buffet of the inner workings of hardware and the software that supports it.

b) The incentive of said 'geek' to actually sit down and not only write but actively maintain said drivers is based on demand and free time. This leads to the parent post "now you see it, now you don't" support syndrome.

c) The incentive of a manufacturer to release quality specifications is next to non-existent. In many cases, only the most determined OSS master-mind is capable of both understanding what are often meant as 'internal use only' documents and actually creating a driver. While I have little doubt such people exist, there is only so much time, sweat, blood, and tears that many people are willing to give for results.

Note that I actively contribute to the open source community and use Linux on a regular basis. That said, I don't believe manufacturers are (entirely) to blame.

I completely disagree; IDEs make more sense on larger projects. Don't get me wrong; none of my IDE's can beat VI's ability to handle large files, and nothing says convenient like an inline diff. When you're working on something that starts to reach the 100+ file mark, I'd rather not rely on a simple editor and my window manager.

A good IDE helps you to organize, track, and maintain your sanity at this scale. In Netbeans 6+, I can jump to a class's declaration, find all usages of a method (regardless of any nasty nesting), and refactor a name change across a project and everything that depends on it. I know where most of my stuff is when I write it, but I find that it can be a NIGHTMARE reviewing a huge project written by a team without sensible documentation.

If you love regular expressions, don't let me stop you, but I think you're missing out.