It's pure idiocy to not take advantage of the ability to have your code merged in, and condemns your customers to not only having to build their own kernels or use ones you provide, but keeps them stuck with old kernel versions.
Right... there's a quite a mess in the embedded world with a lot of device makers stuck on bug-ridden, horribly hacked-up 2.4 kernels. In particular, the execrably unhelpful Broadcom has never released any open-source drivers for its WiFi chipsets, and no binary drivers for 2.6.x kernels (except recently for x86).
Microsoft just doesn't "get" the way Linux works. It's kind of astonishing that even the developers responsible for writing Linux kernel code there haven't figured out the value of cooperating with the kernel team. Well... maybe they have and the suits overruled them. Hard to say.
Richelieu needed those 6 lines written by the hand of a person, so he could forge evidence of some crime in the handwriting of some person.
Citation needed. You are the second person to suggest this - I would be most interested to see a definitive source for this interpretation of his statement.
Nothing in the link you provide backs up your assertion - there is a statement about another person using forged handwriting, but not Richelieu himself. Otherwise, Richelieu's words seem to have a plain meaning on their face which is equally plausible, which is that he prided himself on being able to twist any honest words to amount to a crime under the law at the time.
For example, here in California cable TV is not a state-granted monopoly. And yet, you will find close to zero overlapping cable TV regions. Why?
Because, until fairly recently, it was, in most parts of the state, a local government granted monopoly, and while the local carriers have changed hands (largely to consolidate regions and create bigger regional monopolies), there are significant barriers to entry in any local market, which means that the monopoly carriers are pretty well entrenched, with the main competition coming from alternatives to cable (satellite, services delivered over internet, though the cable providers themselves are also some of the biggest broadband providers) rather than alternative cable providers per se.
Today is a good day for information-gathering. Read someone else's mail file.